yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The On, Off Switch of Consciousness | Breakthrough


less than 1m read
·Nov 11, 2024

To map what goes on inside the brain, Muhammad implants tiny electrodes in his patients' skulls. He then sends pulses to these electrodes, gradually increasing the current, sometimes with dramatic results. Recently, he inserted an electrode next to a small region called the claustrum. The claustrum is uniquely connected to other parts of the brain.

When we were doing the mapping, we were surprised to see what the stimulation of the claustrum resulted in. I asked her to read, and I discovered that stimulation of this one electrode, which is in the claustrum, made her stop reading and have no memory of what happened during the stimulation.

When I was 21, my mother died after a decade-long illness. When Muhammad sends a 14 milliamp electric pulse into the claustrum, the patient freezes midsentence. It's as if her conscious mind has been switched off. Cognitively, she is completely impaired—no language function, no memory function, nor responsiveness.

We drove the country road out to her. When the current is reduced, she picks up exactly where she left off. I taught English at a small college in the Bay Area. The findings led some authors to name the claustrum the on-off switch of consciousness, which, based on this case, is actually pretty accurate.

More Articles

View All
Example dividing a whole by a unit fraction
Let’s think about what 3 divided by 1⁄4 is equal to. Pause this video and see if you can figure it out on your own. And I’ll give you a hint: take three holes and divide it into pieces, or sections, that are each one-fourth of a hole. Then think about how…
The Rise of Pong | Generation X
On loop, bloop-bloop! It was the coolest thing you’ve ever seen in your life, dude. It’s a square ball that’s moving at like the slowest pace ever. It’s like so beautiful to watch. Pong, it’s like this form of meditation. Pong was the first successfully …
Breathing Coal | Years of Living Dangerously
What is this community like? 70% are Latino and African-American. It’s a working-class community. How hard is it to get people in a town like this motivated to take on something this big? There are amazing people that I have met here that maybe have not e…
The upcoming economic crisis? | Stagflation explained
There is a really ugly word that is beginning to be thrown around for the first time in nearly 50 years. The last time the US economy experienced the devastating impacts of this word was way back in the 1970s, a period of time when inflation had a stagger…
Fix Your Financial Thermostat If You Want to Be Rich
Did you know that there’s a little toggle inside of you that determines how much money you’ll earn? Its job is to regulate how comfortable you are with your current financial situation, and it directly impacts if you work harder or if you’re slacking off.…
We are in the "First Inning" of the Real Estate Crash - Billionaire Real Estate Investor
So, we’ve seen discounts already of, let’s say, 10-15%. Are we going to see discounts of 50%? Are we going to see buildings just turned over to the banks? I mean, what does it look like in terms of the bottom for this market? Billionaire real estate inves…