Consciousness may be a mystery, but that does not mean that neuroscientists have no explanations for it. Away from it.
“In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we do not need more theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, a neuroscientist at the University of Birmingham.
If you are looking for a theory to explain how our brains create subjective, internal experiences, you can check the theory of adaptation. Or consider the theory of the dynamic core. Do not forget the first -class theory of representations, so as not to mention the theory of competition of a semantic index. The list continues: a 2021 study identified 29 different theories of consciousness.
Dr. Ferrante belongs to a team of scientists who want to reduce this number, perhaps even below one. But they face a sharp challenge, thanks to the way scientists often study consciousness: they plan a theory, they run experiments to build elements about it and argue that it is better than others.
“We do not encourage to kill our own ideas,” said Lucia Melloni, a neuroscientist at the German Empirical Aesthetics Institute of Germany.
Seven years ago, Dr. Melloni and 41 other scientists began a major study of consciousness that hopes to break this pattern. Their plan was to gather two opposing teams to design an experiment to see how well they did both theories to predict what is happening in our minds during a conscious experience.
The team, called Cogite Consortium, published its results on Wednesday in Nature magazine. But along the road, the study underwent the same conflict with sharp, hoping to avoid.
Dr. Melloni and a team of similar scientists began designing plans for their study in 2018. They wanted to try an approach known as contradictory collaboration, in which scientists with opposing theories join forces with neutral researchers. The team chose two theories for test.
One, called Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, was developed in the early 2000s by Stanislas Dehane, cognitive neuroscientist with Collège de France in Paris and his colleagues. Their theory argues that we are consciously experiencing the world when the basic areas in the front of the brain transmit sensory information throughout the brain.
The other theory, developed by Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin and his colleagues, goes from the integrated information theory. Instead of entrusting the consciousness to specific parts of the brain that do specific things, this theory begins with the basic characteristics of conscious experiences: they feel specific about ourselves, for example, and are rich with details that form a coherent, complex and unified whole – such as Marcel Proust’s experience.
The researchers then asked what kind of physical network – a brain or otherwise – could produce this experience. They concluded that it should imply a lot of information in many different apartments, which then transmit the information to other apartments, creating a comprehensive experience.
The Cogite Consortium mapped an experiment that could put both theories in the test. The champions of the two theories approved it.
“I felt very nice, because it was the first time these people were trying to resolve their disagreements instead of just doing this parallel game,” said Dr. Melloni.
But she and her colleagues knew that the co -operation confrontation would be a huge business. They hired several new researchers, including Dr. Ferrante, and then spent two years planning the experiment and put their laboratory equipment through testing. Starting in the late 2020s, they began scanning the brains of 267 volunteers, working in eight laboratories in the United States, Europe and China.
The researchers had the volunteers to play video games designed to measure their conscious awareness of seeing things. In such a game, the participants received color discs as they fell. Sometimes a blurry face will also be dragged on the screen and volunteers pressed a button to indicate that they noticed.
For maximum understanding, the researchers used three different tools to measure the brain activity of volunteers.
Some volunteers, who underwent surgery for epilepsy, agreed to have temporary incoming electrodes in their brain. A second group was scanned by their brain by FMRI engines, which measured blood flow to their minds. The researchers studied a third group of magneticoebalography, which records magnetic fields of the brain.
By 2022, the researchers had analyzed their data. All three techniques gave the same overall results. Both theories made some accurate predictions about what was happening to the brain as subjects consciously experienced images. But they also made predictions that proved to be wrong.
“Both theories are incomplete,” said Dr. Ferrante.
In June 2023, Dr. Melloni revealed the results at a conference in New York. And Cogite Consortium published the results on the internet and submitted them to nature, hoping that the magazine would publish its document.
Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at Sungkyunkwan University, who was called upon to serve as one of the reviewers, gave a negative crisis. He felt that the consortium had not been carefully located exactly where the brain would test the predictions of each theory.
“It is difficult to make a persuasive assumption that the work is really testing the theories in a meaningful way,” Dr. Lau writes in the July revision.
Dr. Lau, who pioneered his own theory of consciousness, published his appreciation on the internet in August. He then helped write an open letter that criticizes both the cogite and integrated information theory. A total of 124 experts signed it.
The group, called “Conconed Iit”, guided much of its criticism of integrated information theory. They called it pseudoscience, citing withering attacks by scientists in theory in recent years.
These critics have noted that integrated information theory is much more than a theory of how our brains work: If a system that can incorporate information is conscious, then the plants can still be conscious, at least a little bit.
The Cogite Consortium experiment did not respond to his allegations, critics argued because he did not examine the fundamental aspects of the theory. “As researchers, we have a duty to protect the public from scientific misinformation,” wrote Dr. Lau and his colleagues.
Their letter, published online in September 2023, led to a social media debate. The authors wrote a comment to explain their objections in more detail. He appeared last month in Nature Neuroscience magazine.
Dr. Tononi and his colleagues responded to the magazine with a correspondent. Iit-Concerned ‘letter “had a lot of courage and few events”, and the new commentary “is trying to harm the control with the addition of a Polish and philosophy of the science of Palapas”.
Meanwhile, the Cogiteate Consortium paper was still working through peer rating. When he finally came out on Wednesday, he continued to plan divided views.
Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, was impressed by the scale of the study and the discovery of shortcomings in every theory. “I’m glad to see it,” he said. “It’s a huge project.”
But critics who had been convicted by ITT were standing in their original opinion. Joel Snyder, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, in Las Vegas, argued that the predictions that each group that was made could have been created by other theories – so the experiment was not an accurate test.
“It will confuse,” said Dr. Snyder.
In an email, Dr. Lau observed that the new study apparently did not limit the long list of consciousness theories. “From recent discussions, I do not have the impression that these challenges have done anything in theories,” he wrote.
But Dr. Seth also saw a value in the theories between them, even if it does not lead scientists to kill their own ideas. “The best we can hope for a successful confrontation is that other people can change their minds,” he said.
