What does recent research tell us about human consciousness?
Triangulate Health Ltd
Insight and analysis at the intersection between science, policy, and economics.
While this article is based on careful research, it is worth noting that the author is not an expert in the subject matter. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the author's organisation.
What do we experience after we die?
Is it heaven, a replay of your life, or… nothing?
By construction, it’s impossible to know the answer to the questions above – the ones who leave us don’t come back to tell the tale. Or maybe we can get a hint somewhere?
The AWARE study – a multi-centre, prospective study on resuscitated, once-clinically-dead cardiac arrest survivors – does exactly this. Recorded in this study, 2040 patients “flatlined” (with insufficient blood flow to sustain brain activity), and 140 of them were resuscitated and able to give us some insights through interviews.
Amongst them, 61% had no recollection while they were presumed unconscious. Amongst those who remembered their conscious period, most 84% had weak surreal/extra-sensory memories, such as:
Seven survivors had strong recollections akin to commonly described “near-death experiences” (e.g. detailed accounts of a paradise). What I found extraordinary was the one patient who reported having observed his own resuscitation from the corner of the room, outside his body:
“At the beginning, I think, I heard the nurse say ‘dial 444 cardiac arrest’… an automated voice [of the AED] saying ‘shock the patient, shock the patient’… Another man who had a bald head… he had blue scrubs on, and he had a blue hat… saw my blood pressure being taken whilst the doctor was putting something down my throat.”
This account, with the described sequence of events, was later wholly verified by the attending staff.
While the study only provides limited accounts of after-death "perceptions" that could be biased by trauma and personal beliefs, it is fascinating to see reported experience being totally dissimilar to that of anaesthesia, suggesting that our current clinical definition of consciousness may be insufficient.
Quantum consciousness?
Where does consciousness come from? Is it an entity disparate from our body, or is it an “illusion” created by our complex network of neurons and neurotransmitters?
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This age-old debate has invited thinkers and researchers over millennia to tackle the question from various angles. Scientists have discovered a wide array of physical and chemical processes in the brain; at the same time, these processes are all deterministic, seemingly reinforcing the idea that our consciousness is pre-determined by physical laws rather than “free will”. So our brain is just a fancy computer?
Nobel laureate Roger Penrose said no. Based on G?del’s famous Incompleteness Theorem, Penrose provides an elaborate argument that our consciousness cannot arise from computations alone. In his first few books on this subject, he posits that our thoughts are influenced by quantum processes in the brain, giving them some non-deterministic properties.
His theory received immediate criticism, the most prominent of which is that the brain is too much of a harsh environment for any significant quantum activity. In contrast to a quantum computer, where each “quantum bit” is surrounded by layers of cooling machinery, the brain is a warm and messy place. Physicist Tagmark calculated that any quantum processes will break down after just 1 million-trillionth of a second, which is insignificant compared to the speed of any known brain processes.
In Penrose’s newer book The Large, The Small and The Human Mind, he proposed that the quantum effects are isolated in microtubules, one of the most abundant structures found in human cells.
It is unclear whether microtubules contain “mini quantum computers”, but several new pieces of research have observed quantum effects within microtubules, namely quantum resonance and ultraviolet superradiance.
It’s important to note that Penrose did not tell us how specific quantum effects lead to our perceived consciousness, at the same time, the pieces of research mentioned above do not describe the same type of quantum process that Penrose desired. Nevertheless, Penrose proposed theories of consciousness that can be tested by scientific methods, instead of leaving it to mysticism. To me, it is certainly one of the most fascinating areas of research.
So what?
Even if we verify these theories, one could ask what value these types of foundational research can bring to us in the real world, and that's a crucial question. Some studies have revealed that our perceived control over our thoughts and actions (loosely defined as our "free will"), has a considerable impact on our happiness and creativity - a sense of purpose, one might say. The question remains both ubiquitous and deeply personal - would a better understanding of our consciousness provide us with a deeper sense of fulfilment?
Author: Zicheng Wang
Header photo credit: vchel on Canva
Chief Product Officer at Bizbrains | Author of "How to forge Value from Chaos: Untangling Product Complexity" | Owner of ProductBooster.dk - Blog and occasional mentorships
3 个月Time is a difficult subject to understand and maybe it is just a perception. When you are 5 years old, a year or month feels like forever, but when you are 50 it feels like a snap with your fingers. In quantum theory time is not even part of the system. And in the general relativity theory time is a dimension like the other 3, which is also relative according to your speed and curvature of space. My theory is that within our own consiousness our perception is that our own life is infinite in time. The time before you were born does not give sense, and (maybe) neither the time after your death, like nothingness - it is impossible to understand. The time between birth and death is the only time you can comprehend..