How does the brain organize information? This question means that for any function, what is the internal arrangement by the brain to define that specific function, such that it is different from other functions?
Why is a function in attention sometimes and not at other times? Why may the function succeed some other function in one instance and another, later?
What should be sought for answers around the question of consciousness is how the brain organizes information and how the information is graded for experience at different instances.
If this is the question, then any new suggestion of what might be responsible for consciousness should look at how the suggestion fits, towards making progress in consciousness research.
For example, why does cold water feel better during a hot weather? Why does warm water feel better during a cold weather? Can the thirst be the appetite for water, or the craving for water of a certain temperature for an experience that may counter the existing [or prioritized] temperature experience in the body, at the time?
This means that temperature is information organized, then the grading of the temperature, as an experience is an accompanying factor. So, how does this work and what might the options be?
There is a recent opinion in Scientific American, Consciousness Might Hide in Our Brain’s Electric Fields, stating that, “A mysterious electromagnetic mechanism may be more important than the firing of neurons in our brains to explain our awareness. While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes travelling throughout brain cells, “ephaptic” field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings. In 1943 American scientists first described what is known today as the neural code, or spike code. They fleshed out a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the “all or none” nature of neural firing—similar to how today’s computers work. Since then neuroscientists around the world have engaged in a vast endeavor to crack the neural code in order to understand the specifics of cognition and consciousness. Retinal neurons, for example, operate without any neural firing. These cells employ a type of electrodiffusion, the diffusion of charged particles without synapses, the connection points between neurons. Electrodiffusion passes along a signal to the optic nerve at very fast rates and with high bandwidth. We couldn’t see without this. The “ephaptic” in ephaptic coupling simply means “touching.” Though not well-known, ephaptic field effects result from the textbook electric and magnetic interactions that power our cells. Intriguing experimental results suggest these same forces play a bigger role in the brain than one suspected and perhaps even in consciousness. Another team compared the speed of ephaptic field effects in various tissues, finding that the speed of propagation of ephaptic fields in gray matter is about 5,000 times faster than neural firing.”
Electric fields produced by neurons, electrodiffusion and high speeds of ephaptic fields in the gray matter have to be explained to fit how information is organized and how they grade that information.
Their presence suggests that they support both objectives, but in what ways? They are also of distant similarities to electrical signals, showing that in terms of relaying information, they may somewhat contribute, but they would have to meet a source where information is organized to be viable to consciousness. Simply, what are they relaying or what is in the field? Where do they get the information they bear and where do they deliver it?
Retinal cells are just one of the several ‘port’ cells for external sensory inputs, which include those for smell, touch, taste and hearing. It means that whatever is seen comes in a configuration, which is passed along until interpretation in the visual cortex. So while electrodiffusion works in retinal neurons, they act in the ‘mechanism’ of electrical signals, showing that they may work in their stead—in some form, conceptually.
In an explanation by Harvard Brain Science Initiative, Spooky Action Potentials at a Distance: Ephaptic Coupling, it stated that, “In principle, ephaptic coupling is quite simple. Because neurons are electrogenic, they produce electric fields. These fields, if strong enough and/or positioned precisely, are able to influence the electrical excitability of neighboring neurons near-instantaneously.”
This means that they are still in the operational province of electrical signals, conceptually. They either support or work like electrical signals, so to speak, making it possible that they may get to make contributions [directly or indirectly] to electrical signals, conceptually.
It is theorized that the human mind is the collection of all the electrical and chemical signals, in sets, with their interactions and features, in clusters of neurons across the central and peripheral nervous systems.
Simply, the human mind, or the basis of all human experiences, are the signals, in sets, with how they interact and how those interactions are graded. Whatever else may support the work of both, but those are the principal elements that set up functions and measure how those functions work.
Electrical and chemical signals are not how neurons communicate, but the basis for how information is organized. This means that even defining ephaptic coupling as a basis for communication [as a basis for consciousness] already gets the operational mode of the mind wrong. What would neurons be communicating if there were, smell or sound, what would they need it for?
The focus for how consciousness arises and how functions are defined/measured are principally the electrical and chemical signals, in sets, conceptually.
There is a recent paper in Nature, Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy, stating that, “Pregnancy is a period of profound hormonal and physiological changes experienced by millions of women annually, yet the neural changes unfolding in the maternal brain throughout gestation are not well studied in humans. Leveraging precision imaging, we mapped neuroanatomical changes in an individual from preconception through 2 years postpartum. Pronounced decreases in gray matter volume and cortical thickness were evident across the brain, standing in contrast to increases in white matter microstructural integrity, ventricle volume and cerebrospinal fluid, with few regions untouched by the transition to motherhood. This dataset serves as a comprehensive map of the human brain across gestation, providing an open-access resource for the brain imaging community to further explore and understand the maternal brain.”
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