A new state of consciousness

from maplevalleyreporter

• July 17, 2014 at 10:00AM updated Jul 18, 2014 at 9:51AM

During the next few days, legal pot stores will start popping up all over King and Pierce counties. However, some of our cautious, duly-elected, local  officials have, diplomatically and politically, decided to slap a moratorium on legal pot within city limits. Of course, that’s only temporary, until they figure out how they want to handle the issue. In the meantime, to get your buzz on you’ll have to drive to retail weed stores in cities without a moratorium or just about any other wide spot in the road.

I knew this would happen sooner or later, but it’s still a bit boggling to realize the hour has finally arrived. Yet, upon the eve of this auspicious occasion, there are still many people who can’t get their heads around the idea. The other afternoon, a rather casual acquaintance and I were sharing coffee in the Lee, when he turned to me and said: “I just don’t understand why a fella wants to try that crap. Can you explain that to me?”

Well, yeah, I probably can. (And it isn’t very often I can explain much of anything.) There actually seems to be an innate, genetic reason for our desire to use not only pot, but a host of other stimulants and depressants and psychedelics, running the gamut from caffeine to heroin.

Yes, you read that correctly. Inherent in our very DNA, there appears to be a desire – a biological need – to experience and seek new and original states of consciousness. Social-psychological experiments have fooled around with this idea for at least 50 years and, in the last 30, the “hard” sciences have uncovered additional supporting evidence. A lot of it. While using CAT scans to map and define specific areas of the brain, scientists have isolated a particular region in our frontal lobes that quests and explores new experiences and new states of awareness.

Through the years, scholars have hung various labels on this region and each label suggests a slightly different interpretation of what’s going on there. Thus, it’s been called the “curiosity center” and it accounts for our desire to experience new stuff in general. Christian groups have sighted this area as a “spiritual center,” thereby claiming we have an inherent need for religion; that is, our brains are wired to seek “spiritual dimensions.” Hoping to be more objective about the whole thing, most scientists generally agree it’s a part of the brain that simply craves new states of consciousness.

So, we consume caffeine because we want to wake up an be more alert. We smoke nicotine to get the same effect. We often use alcohol to relax, to attain a more mellow and sociable state of mind.   Therefore, to answer the casual acquaintance I mentioned earlier, we try pot because we’re curious about the effects. Some people also try heroin.

The intensity of our inherent desire for new experiences varies from one individual to another, just as I.Q. or physical agility or sexual energy varies. Then too, outside social conditioning and situations can suppress or stimulate our natural, genetic legacy. Consequently, some people anxiously and willingly and recklessly try any damn fool drug that comes down the pike, while others think twice before having a second cup of coffee.

But – and this is my main point after all this scholastic babble – we all inherit, with varying degrees of intensity, a desire to seek and experience new states of consciousness.

Scientists Accidentally Discover The Brain's Consciousness "Off Switch"

from io9.com


George Dvorsky

Filed to: NEUROSCIENCE

• SCIENCE
• CONSCIOUSNESS
• CLAUSTRUM
• DEEP BRAIN STIMULATION

Today 7:00am

While performing deep brain surgery on a woman with epilepsy, neuroscientists from George Washington University stimulated an area of her brain that unexpectedly — and temporarily — caused her to lose awareness. It's a discovery that could shed light on the very nature of consciousness itself.

"We describe a region in the human brain where electrical stimulation reproducibly disrupted consciousness," write the scientists in their study. It's an important finding as the "neural mechanisms that underlie consciousness are not fully understood." No doubt, consciousness is still a profound mystery, so much so that we don't know how it arises — or how it switches off.

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Mohamad Koubeissi and his team were using deep brain electrodes to record signals from different brain regions to figure out where the woman's seizures were coming from. They placed one electrode near a part of the deep brain called the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before.

The claustrum is a thin and weirdly shaped sheet of neurons that's attached to the underside of the neocortex right smack-dab in the center of the brain. Though the precise role of the claustrum is not known, it's suspected to play a role in communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, specifically those regions that control attention. It works like a conductor in an orchestra, coordinating the cerebral cortex. But instead of synchronizing musicians, it synchronizes the timescale between various brain parts, resulting in the seamless quality of conscious experience.

Helen Thomson from New Scientist reports:

When the team zapped the area with high frequency electrical impulses, the woman lost consciousness. She stopped reading and stared blankly into space, she didn't respond to auditory or visual commands and her breathing slowed. As soon as the stimulation stopped, she immediately regained consciousness with no memory of the event. The same thing happened every time the area was stimulated during two days of experiments.

To confirm that they were affecting the woman's consciousness rather than just her ability to speak or move, the team asked her to repeat the word "house" or snap her fingers before the stimulation began. If the stimulation was disrupting a brain region responsible for movement or language she would have stopped moving or talking almost immediately. Instead, she gradually spoke more quietly or moved less and less until she drifted into unconsciousness. Since there was no sign of epileptic brain activity during or after the stimulation, the team is sure that it wasn't a side effect of a seizure.

Koubeissi thinks that the results do indeed suggest that the claustrum plays a vital role in triggering conscious experience. "I would liken it to a car," he says. "A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement – the gas, the transmission, the engine – but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together. So while consciousness is a complicated process created via many structures and networks – we may have found the key."

An exciting discovery, to be sure. But a word of caution; the woman was missing part of her hippocampus, which was removed to treat her epilepsy, so she doesn't possess a "normal" brain. Clearly, these results need to be reproduced in others before we get too carried away with the findings.

Check out the entire report at New Scientist. And read the entire study at Epilepsy and Behavior: "Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness".

Image: styleuneed.de/shutterstock.

Follow me on Twitter: @dvorsky