Applying Physics to Understanding the Mystery of Consciousness
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The study published today in Physical Review Research describes how tools from physics and complexity theory were used to determine the level of consciousness in fruit flies.
"This is a major problem in neuroscience, where it is crucial to differentiate between unresponsive vegetative patients and those suffering from a condition in which a patient is aware but cannot move or communicate verbally because of complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body," said study author Dr. Kavan Modi, from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy.
[...] "Our technique allows us to distinguish between flies that have been anesthetized and those that have not, by calculating the time-complexity of the signals," said Dr. Modi.
[...] The research team studied the brain signals produced by 13 fruit flies both when they were awake and when they were anesthetized. They then analyzed the signals to see how complex they were.
"We found the statistical complexity to be larger when a [fly] is awake than when the same [fly] is anaesthetized," Dr. Modi said.
[...] The researchers concluded that applying a similar analysis to other datasets, in particular, human EEG data could lead to new discoveries regarding the relationship between consciousness and complexity.
Journal Reference
Roberto N. Munoz, et. al.General anesthesia reduces complexity and temporal asymmetry of the informational structures derived from neural recordings in Drosophila, Phys. Rev. Research 2, 023219 (2020)
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