Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness: A Journey Through the Intriguing World of the Brain

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Ever since I read David Eagleman's "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain", I've been super interested in how consciousness works. It's such a cool concept of having behind-the-scenes work done in your own head. I've found that the idea of consciousness bridges many different subject areas, including neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. In this blog post, I'll be talking about two different pieces of research regarding consciousness and what I find fascinating about it!

The paper we're going to talk about today is called, "Fronto-parietal networks shape human conscious report through attention gain and reorienting". It sounds super complicated but I'll give you a quick summary of what it talks about (I'll link the paper down below you guys can check it out). Basically, the authors found that different brain networks are involved in different aspects of conscious perception. 

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The right hemisphere seems to be more important for attentional gain, while the left hemisphere seems to be more important for a conscious report. The authors found that these different brain networks are connected by the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which is a major white matter tract that acts like a bridge between the frontal and parietal lobes. This suggests that these different brain networks work together to support conscious perception. 

I thought that this was cool because before reading this paper, I believed that consciousness was a sort of thing that worked on its own, but in reality, consciousness is manifested through the collaboration of multiple brain regions. In addition, we know that the left and right hemispheres of the brain control different parts of what we do as humans. The fact that the right hemisphere is more important for attentional gain and the left hemisphere is more important for conscious reports ties into the idea that there is a functional specialization within the brain related to consciousness. 

In the future, I think an intriguing way of using what this paper found would be to investigate the different brain networks involved in conscious perception even deeper, as it can help explain individual differences in conscious experiences and cognitive abilities.

Overall, I feel like this kind of research is crucial because it helps us unravel the mysteries of consciousness and brings us closer to comprehending how the brain generates our subjective experiences and perceptions. I'll definitely be reading more research papers regarding consciousness in the future!

Link to Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-023-05108-2