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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.
That sounds like the experiments that my wife has been doin
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...did it also coincide with the TV being turned on?
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From TFA:
Anil Seth, who studies consciousness at the University of Sussex, UK, warns that we have to be cautious when interpreting behaviour from a single case study. The woman was missing part of her hippocampus, which was removed to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn't represent a "normal" brain, he says.
Normally a scientist will not ethically be able to put deep brain electrodes in a person, but this was likely part of a larger experiment related to the hippocampus surgery. It will be interesting to see if similar cases present similar behaviors and more interesting if the same thing happens in someone with a full hippocampus.
I have been experimenting with this technique since the early 80s. It is possible to stimulate the claustrum via pressure along the sternocleidomastoid. By pinching this area it causes sympathetic nerve activity that can effective render someone unconscious. My colleague has perfected the technique to the point that he uses it at parties. Quite eerie, actually.
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Hee hee! Oh I like that. Press the button again. Wait until he's chewing that spoonful. Now, replace the ice cream with castor oil. Let me press it! Let me press it!
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Forget implant devices. With enough mental training, Vulcans can stimulate this part of the humanoid brain just by pinching someone on the neck.
(Luckily, humanoids have very similar physiology in their nervous systems.)
We've been doing all surgery with no Anastasia since 1918
That's the Zzz spot, not the G spot.
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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.