In New York, on June 23, 1998, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC), the neuroscientist Christoph Koch, then an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), made a bet against the philosopher David. Chalmers says that in 25 years, from now, 2023, we will have already solved one of science’s greatest mysteries: how the brain makes consciousness possible.
Nine years after that race, I met Christoph Koch personally during my sabbatical at Caltech in 2007 and collaborated on experiments in his lab on the brain’s mechanisms of consciousness. In One of the most important of those tests We tried to figure out how to remove consciousness, how to see without seeing. To do this, a special optical device made it possible to send a different image to each eye of the test subject. A series of images from Mondrian’s paintings were projected into one eye with a fixed figure, for example, a face, and with the other eye, constantly fluctuating.
When this was done, the inevitable attention to these fluctuations in one eye prevented him from knowing what he was seeing in the other. But that didn’t stop his brain from unconsciously registering an image of the face, and then finding that the same image performed better than anything else (never seen) in a new association experiment between different stimuli. By canceling out conscious experience, the aim is to discover what minimal areas of the brain make possible.
Experiments of this kind, and many others, carried out in various countries and laboratories with advanced techniques (such as functional magnetic resonance and computerized electroencephalography), have established two main theories about how the brain creates consciousness. One of them was proposed by Italian Julius Dononi and American scientists like Koch. The functional integration theory of the activity of neurons: To date, he proposes that consciousness results spontaneously from the structural complexity of the posterior regions of the cerebral cortex (millions of neurons and trillions of interconnections between them). If artificial intelligence can create a device of that level of complexity, the device will become self-aware.
Other A theory of the network or global workplace, proposed by scientists such as Gerald Edelman, Joseph Kelley, and Bernard Parse, states that consciousness arises when certain information is programmed into different areas of the brain. This proposal implicates the brain’s prefrontal cortex as the main causal agent.
At this time, when the well-known race between Koch and Chalmers expired, these two theories were not exempt from criticism; That is, none has advanced far enough to be considered a definitive explanation of consciousness. Functional integration theory does not demonstrate the coherence between brain regions that makes it possible, and the global neural locus is not always in the prefrontal cortex. That’s why the philosopher Chalmers has won: In the intervening 25 years, we still haven’t been able to reveal how the brain must work to make consciousness possible.
But Koch, an underdog romantic as he calls himself, hasn’t given up and is already talking to Chalmers about giving the race a second go. He goes in his typical German role. I remember a retreat I attended during my time at Caltech in Santa Barbara, California, and students filled the auditorium even on weekends when Koch was the speaker. He was a scientific idol and, among other things, allowed himself to travel to Spain to attend performances of Wagner operas at the Barcelona Lyceum, accompanied by the neuroscientist Semir Zeki, professor of neurobiology at the University of London.
Christoph Koch recently left Caltech to join the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, Washington as a researcher, where he is committed to unlocking the mysteries of consciousness. David Chalmers, now co-director of New York University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, said he would accept the race again, and we would be called back for another 25 years. Lucky then.
Gray material A place that tries to explain in an accessible way how the brain creates mind and controls behavior. The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their key deficits, will be analyzed in the hope that knowing how they work is tantamount to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships. others.
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