The evidence can be a mystery, but that is not found, it means that neuroscientists have no explanation for it. Nothing of the sort.
“In the field of consciousness, there are already so many theories that we do not need theories,” said Oscar Ferrante, neuroscientific from the University of Birmingham.
If you are looking for a theory to explain how we give rise to subjective and internal experiences, you can consult adaptive resonance theory. O Consider dynamic nucleus theory. Do not forget the theory of first -order representation, not to mention the theory of the semantic competition of the pointer. The list continues: a 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness.
Dr. Ferrante belongs to a group of scientists who wish to reduce that number, maybe only to one. But they face a strong challenge, thanks to how scientists of the study of the study: they devise a theory, carry out experiments to generate evidence and argue that it is better than the ethers.
“We are not encouraged to kill our ideas,” said Lucia Melloni, neuroscientific from the Max Planck Institute for empirical aesthetics in Frankfurt, Germany.
Seven years ago, Dr. Melloni and another 41 scientists embarked on an important study on consciousness that expected this employer to break. His plan was to gather two rival groups to design an experiment to see how well both theories did to predict what happens in our brains in a conscious experience.
The team, called The Cogitation Consortium, published its results on Wednesday in Nature magazine. But along the way, the study became subject to the same conflicts with sharp smells they hoped to avoid.
Dr. Melloni and a group of related ideas scientists began plans for study in 2018. To prove an approach known as adversary collaboration, in which scientists with opposite theories join forces with neutral researchers. The team chose two theories to try.
A global neuronal work space theory was developed in the early 2000s by Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France in Paris, and its colleagues. His theory argues that we consciously experience the world when the key regions 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, is carried out with the name of the integrated information theory. Insigning to assign consciousness to particular parts of the brain that do party things, this theory begins with the basic characteristics of conscious experiences: they feel specific to ourselves, for example, and are rich in details, such as -solos, such as in fact, I like it, those who like them, those who were told, to the prayers, the whole whole while they miterate.
Then, the researchers asked what type of physical network, a brain or other, could produce that experience. They concluded that it must involve processing a lot of information in numerous different compartments, which pass the information to other compartments, creating an integrated experience.
The Cogitation Consortium mapped an experiment that could test both theories. The champions of the two theories supported him.
“He felt particularly good, because it was the first time that these people tried to solve their disagreements instead of simply making this parallel play,” Dr. Go. Melloni said.
But she and her colleagues knew that adversary collaboration would be a great company. They recruited several young researchers, including Dr. Ferrante, and then two years passed by designing the experiment and placing their laboratory team through tests. From the end of 2020, they begin to scan the brain of 267 volunteers, working in eight laboratories in the United States, Europe and China.
The researchers made the volunteers play video games designed to measure their conscious awareness of seeing things. In one of those games, the participants caught Colouords albums while scratched. Sometimes, a blurred face also moved along the screen, and the volunteers pressed a button to indicate that they noticed.
For maximum understanding, researchers used three different tools to measure the brain activity of volunteers.
Some volunteers, who underwent epilepsy surgery, agreed that electrodes are temporarily inserted into their brains. A second group had their brains scanned by FMRI machines, which measured the flow of blood in their brains. The researchers studied a third group with Magnetoenphalography, which records the magnetic fields of a brain.
By 2022, the researchers had come to analyze their data. The three techniques delivered the same general results. Both theories made some precise predictions about what was happening in the brain as consciously experimental images. But they also made predictions that were wrong.
“Both theories are incomplete,” said Dr. Ferrante.
In June 2023, Dr. Melloni announced the results at a conference in New York. And the Cogitation Consortium published the results online and sent them to nature, with the hope that the magazine will publish its document.
Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist from Sungkyunkwan University who was asked to serve as one of the reviewers, issued a negative judgment. He felt that the Cogitation Consortium had not carefully presented exactly where in the brain would try the predictions of each theory.
“It is difficult to present a convincing case that the project really tests theories in a significant way,” Dr. Lau wrote in his July review.
Dr. Lau, who has a pioneer in a theory of own consciousness, published his online evaluation that August. Then he helped write an open letter criticizing both the cogitation experiment and the integrated information theory. A total of 124 experts signed it.
The group, which was called “Iit-Concened”, directed much of the criticisms of the integrated theory of information. They called him pseudoscience, cite with attacks that scientists have done about the theory in recent years.
These critics pointed out that the integrated theory of information is much more than a simple theory about how our brains operates: if any system that can integrate information has awareness, then plants can simply aware, at least a little.
The experiment of the Cogitation Consortium did not comply with his statements, critics argued, because he did not prove the fundamental aspects of the theory. “As researchers, we have the duty to protect the public from scientific misinformation,” wrote Dr. Lau and his colleagues.
His letter, published online in September 2023, led to a storm or debate on social networks. The authors wrote a comment to explain their objections in more detail; It appeared last month in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
Dr. Tononi and his colleagues responded in the newspaper with a replica. Iit’s letter “had a lot of fervor and little facts,” they wrote, and the new comment “tries to control damage by adding some Polish and a science philosophy sheet.”
Meanwhile, the document of the Cogitation Consortium, which still made its way through peer review. When he finally left on Wednesday, he continued drawing divided opinions.
Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, was impressed by the study scale and its discovery of deficiencies in each theory. “I’m delighted to see him,” he said. “It’s a tremendous job.”
But the critics of the ITT group supported their original opinion. Joel Snyder, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, maintained that the predictions that each team made could also have been generated from other theories, so the experiment was not a precise test of any of them.
“It will generate confusion,” said Dr. Snyder.
In an email, Dr. Lau noted that the new study had apparently reduced the long list of consciousness theories. “According to recent discussions, I don’t have the impression that thesis challenges have done anything to theories,” he wrote.
But Dr. Seth still saw a value to face theories with each other, equally if he does not lead scientists to kill their own ideas. “The best thing we can expect from successful adversary collaboration is that other people can change mind,” he said.
