Human consciousness produced in ‘slices’
Scientists at l’École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed new insights in to consciousness, which emerges from unconsciousness in 400 millisecond intervals.
Consciousness works as a continuous flow wherein the senses follow one another, providing constant information by which we perceive our world. The EPFL, however, argues that this sensory information can only be collected by the brain during ephemeral exposures, much like a camera taking multiple consecutive photographs. A growing body of evidence now opposes the theory of ‘continuous consciousness’.
Professor Michael Herzog of the EPFL said: “The reason is that the brain wants to give you the best, clearest information it can, and this demands a substantial amount of time. There is no advantage in making you aware of its unconscious processing, because that would be immensely confusing.”
This new paradigm, developed by Herzog with associate professor Thomas Kammer of the University of Ulm, Germany, and assistant professor Frank Scharnowski of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, promotes consciousness as a ‘conceptual framework’ by the review of previous behavioural and psychological data. The experiments showed two rapidly successive images, the stimuli, to a test subject and asked them to distinguish what it was they had seen whilst their brain activity was monitored.
From this experiment, researchers learnt that the process of information into the consciousness came in stages rather than as a continuous feed. The unconscious stage, wherein the brain processes specific features of objects, came first, followed by the conscious stage wherein unconscious processing is completed. The human brain merely accepts these stages as a single physiological flow to produce the final sensory perception, i.e. it becomes aware of the stimuli.
The whole process, from stimulus to consciousness, lasts up to 400 milliseconds for visual perception – a considerable delay in physiological terms – but may differ for the other senses.
The team’s report was published in PLoS ONE and can be downloaded here.
