The result is really interesting, and I would love to read more when they reach n=5. (Or even n=1 on a reasonably normal brain.)
But Crick's notion sounds a lot like what Dennett derisively calls the "Cartesian Theater", the tendency to imagine consciousness as little room where a tiny homunculus watches the screens where all sensory data is displayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
In Dennett's view, consciousness is basically a distributed system. There is no single place where consciousness "really happens". That a single electrode can disrupt consciousness doesn't suggest otherwise. If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens".
I would assume these researchers are well aware of such problems. I still think it's very important to research it.
If we take a signal like a certain sound that evokes an experience, or we can even ask the person to do some conscious processing based on the sound, the sound could be a question like "what is the color of the sky?".
We can follow the signal: We can see first some mechanical preprocessing steps in the ear, then some neural preprocessing steps, and the signal is branched out, lots of different brain areas are probably activated and then again some fine movement post processing steps are done so that the person finally answers "blue".
I think it would be premature say that all the trivial very low level preprocessing steps in the ear are just as a relevant part of the conscious experience of hearing the question, as the understanding of the question.
Say, in a stretched analogy, if someone would like to understand how the computer can calculate some ray tracing or use some compression algorithms, it would not be that important to just understand how on die caches or PCI express lanes work. The important bit is to understand how instructions cause the ALU:s to wrangle the bits in registers, that's the core of the magic, most of the other stuff is relatively trivial pre- and postprocessing.
So in this sense I think the question is well posed.
There's also practical implications. Think if we could have reliable anesthesia (or the hypnosis part of it, you might still need pain killers and muscle relaxants). We might have very few side effects. We would not have to give big doses just to be safe. This could mean much faster recovery after anesthesia.
Also costs of anesthesia would drop immensely if it could be even better controlled than it is now. It costs a lot to stay in a hospital. Also if you're unconscious, you have to be taken care of, again tying people...
Ketamine is indeed safer than many other anesthetics in terms of the risk of respiratory depression, which is why it is a common choice for veterinary anesthesia. However, it's not uniformly better than more conventional anesthetics. Its half-life is substantially longer than that of propofol, so it actually takes longer to recover from. There is also some evidence that repeated administration of ketamine can produce brain damage, although it's unclear whether this is clinically relevant.
As long as we're on the topic of targeting the claustrum specifically with pharmaceutical agents, I'll point out that the claustrum has a particularly high density of kappa opioid receptors, which are the target of salvinorin A, the active constituent of the psychotropic plant Salvia divinorum [1]. Of course we have no evidence the plant's effects are specifically related to its action in the claustrum.
[1] Smythies, J., Edelstein, L., & Ramachandran, V. (2012). Hypotheses relating to the function of the claustrum. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 6. doi:10.3389/fnint.2012.00053
The claustrum is suspected to be a key junction that ties together different systems, making coordination between systems possible. This possibility is suggested by the claustrum's seemingly unique anatomical situation--so many other regions run into it like no other.
If the claustrum is a junction connecting myriad systems, enabling coordinated forms of mental life, possibly consciousness, then in a sense, it could really be a key to consciousness.
Calling this critical juncture key to consciousness is not saying the claustrum is a theater where a homunculus watches everything come together, or that consciousness happens in the claustrum.
Consciousness is a state of the brain where disparate systems interact, and the claustrum may be key to explaining that coordination in consciousness.
Borrowing the car analogy in the article, the ignition system isn't where a car "runs". Nonetheless, the ignition is key to explaining how everything that comes together to put the car in a running state. I think people are misreading what the investigator meant when he suggests the claustrum might be key to explaining the conscious state.
Am I wrong here? Somebody quote me the passage I'm missing where the investigators say the claustrum is where consciousness happens, rather than just saying that the claustrum may be key to understanding how consciousness happens.
The sentence in the article that reminded me of Dennett was this one: "Crick was working on a paper that suggested our consciousness needs something akin to an orchestra conductor to bind all of our different external and internal perceptions together."
Thanks for sourcing. I guess it's not your fault for reading the author's anthropomorphized metaphor and thinking "homunculus", particularly if you have no familiarity with Crick and Koch's project. In any case, while relating one anthropomorphic metaphor to another is not bad analogy making, the analogy doesn't correspond in fact to what Crick and Koch are looking for. They do believe consciousness has a unified quality, where the input of disparate system form a gestalt. The problem is explaining how all input from so many systems coordinate together. Functionally, there must be a juncture to make coordination--hence the "conductor" metaphor--but how, where? As it happens, there is a piece of anatomy that looks like a physical nexus--the claustrum.
Well, the cable junction is also part of what really happens.
Not quite as much. If the cable junction fails, someone downstream of that junction won't have access to the calculations, but someone upstream of it still will. Whereas, if the clock in a CPU fails, there's no calculations happening anywhere.
But Crick's notion sounds a lot like what Dennett derisively calls the "Cartesian Theater", the tendency to imagine consciousness as little room where a tiny homunculus watches the screens where all sensory data is displayed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater
In Dennett's view, consciousness is basically a distributed system. There is no single place where consciousness "really happens". That a single electrode can disrupt consciousness doesn't suggest otherwise. If a backhoe hitting a cable junction triggered an AWS failure, we wouldn't say that the cable junction is where AWS "really happens".