Why the mind-body connection is vital to understanding consciousness

IF YOU needed to level to the place the place consciousness emerges, you’d most likely purpose your finger squarely at your head. That’s the simple bit. Precisely the place the mind circuitry for consciousness lies, or how the bodily properties therein seemingly remodel into the subjective feeling of being, are questions which have bamboozled us for hundreds of years. And it seems that we would have been wanting within the unsuitable place all alongside.

The mind by itself isn’t sufficient to generate subjective expertise, says Catherine Tallon-Baudry, a neuroscientist on the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. With out the physique, the self merely wouldn’t exist. “Simply because the notion of ‘automobile’ exists provided that a sure variety of parts are current and interacting with one another,” she says.

As a substitute, researchers have come to recognise that our sense of interoception, which displays inside physique alerts – equivalent to coronary heart fee, ache, thirst and pleasure – performs a significant function in creating our ideas and feelings. Now, many think about interoception to be a elementary characteristic of consciousness, too.

Our inside organs, significantly the center and intestine, are key gamers in constructing our acutely aware expertise, says Tallon-Baudry. Each have their very own self-generated rhythm, separate from the mind – and this, Tallon-Baudry believes, supplies a useful hook on which the mind can dangle its sense of self.

Taking the thought a step additional, Antonio Damasio on the College of Southern California says that inside physique alerts aren’t simply concerned in consciousness – they’re consciousness. “Folks proceed speaking about consciousness as the nice thriller that will probably be revealed by understanding the mind, and that’s unsuitable,” …