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Consciousness On-Off Switch Discovered Deep In Brain
An anonymous reader writes "One moment you're conscious, the next you're not. For the first time, researchers have switched off consciousness by electrically stimulating a single brain area. Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests that a single area – the claustrum – might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations and emotions. It takes us a step closer to answering a problem that has confounded scientists and philosophers for millennia – namely how our conscious awareness arises. When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments.
The original article seems to be conspicuously missing. Here is the pubmed reference (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24967698), but the link there is broken too and even browsing through the journal's archive doesn't bring up any reference to the article. Hopefully that gets fixed very soon.
Also, back when I was PhD student in neuroscience Crick and Koch's idea that the claustrum was the seat of consciousness was one of my class's favorite jokes- if it turns out they were actually right I'm gonna be so f-ing mad.
General anesthetic is actually a lot more crude than most people think. It's essentially a short-term induced coma, that's why they need to jam a breathing tube down your throat and it feels like you just gave Satan a blowjob when they bring you out.
This sounds like the first baby steps towards developing a drug-free method of dropping patients out of consciousness, maybe even with little to no side effects.