Bill Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, has spent the last twenty years studying how neurons encode information and how they use it to make decisions about the world.
But Newsome is obsessed with a lingering question: How does consciousness arise from brain function? He feels the best way to answer that question is by implanting an electrode into his own brain–and seeing how the electric current changes his perception of the world.
Chris,
It might depend what area he’s after. My neuroscience is rusty, but last time I checked TMS is pretty “shallow.”
yeah, good point (i brought this up on another forum and got the same response!)
From what little I could gather from the article, however, it doesn’t sound like he’s planning to go very deep into cortex anyway, for fear of damage to vasculature. Then again, I could just be exaggering what’s between the lines.
Guys,
TMS won’t cut it - not because it is shallow, but because its spatial resolution is egregiously bad. At best one can restrict TMS effects to roughly a square cm of brain (as I understand it). The clusters of neurons that carry the discrete motion signals in MT are on the order of 100-200 microns. TMS would simply smear a signal across clusters encoding ALL directions of motion. What I want to know is what one “sees” when a single cluster, encoding a particular direction of motion, is electrically stimulated. This is the central goal - being able to correlate the activity of *physiologically* characterized microcircuits to perceptual experience. Just blasting the brain indiscriminately with large amount of current is of little scientific value to me….
Regards,
Bill Newsome
Stanford University
Like trying to punch the buttons on a cell phone with your elbow? Or what’s the other one I’ve heard: like a monkey playing a harpsichord with shovel?
Thanks, Bill. Good luck. Keep us posted, although, somehow I believe that we’ll hear about it if you win approval for your experiment.
If you need a writer to cover it, I’m your man.
Richard Dooling
Something to say?
Bad Behavior has blocked 362 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Interesting idea, but as he admits, it’s not particularly new. If his goal is direct neural stimulation, I’m surprised he doesn’t just buy himself a big magnet and do some DIY transcranial magnetic stimulation.
I mean, how much is a single electrode or electrode array in IT likely to tell us about consciousness? It would be much more efficient to spend the time (and insurance money) on TMS.
Left by Chris Chatham on February 15th, 2006