Why the mind-body connection is vital to understanding consciousness

Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

IF YOU had to constituent to the spot wherever consciousness emerges, you would astir apt purpose your digit squarely astatine your head. That is the casual bit. Exactly wherever the encephalon circuitry for consciousness lies, oregon however the carnal properties therein seemingly alteration into the subjective feeling of being, are questions that person bamboozled america for centuries. And it turns retired that we mightiness person been looking successful the incorrect spot each along.

The encephalon connected its ain isn’t capable to make subjective experience, says Catherine Tallon-Baudry, a neuroscientist astatine the Ecole Normale Supérieure successful Paris, France. Without the body, the aforesaid simply wouldn’t exist. “Just arsenic the conception of ‘car’ exists lone if a definite fig of components are contiguous and interacting with each other,” she says.

Instead, researchers person travel to recognise that our consciousness of interoception, which monitors interior assemblage signals – specified arsenic bosom rate, pain, thirst and pleasance – plays a large relation successful creating our thoughts and emotions. Now, galore see interoception to beryllium a cardinal diagnostic of consciousness, too.

Our interior organs, peculiarly the bosom and gut, are cardinal players successful gathering our conscious experience, says Tallon-Baudry. Both person their ain self-generated rhythm, abstracted from the encephalon – and this, Tallon-Baudry believes, provides a useful hook connected which the encephalon tin bent its consciousness of self.

Taking the thought a measurement further, Antonio Damasio astatine the University of Southern California says that interior assemblage signals aren’t conscionable progressive successful consciousness – they are consciousness. “People proceed talking astir consciousness arsenic the large enigma that volition beryllium revealed by knowing the brain, and that’s wrong,” …