Study Reveals the Gateway to Conscious Awareness
martyb writes:
"Information processing in the brain has two dimensions: sensory processing of the environment without awareness and the type that occurs when a stimulus reaches a certain level of importance and enters conscious awareness," explains Zirui Huang, Ph.D., research investigator in the [University of Michigan] Department of Anesthesiology.
[...] For the experiments, participants were put inside of a fMRI machine and administered the anesthetic drug propofol to control their level of consciousness. They were then asked to imagine themselves playing tennis, walking down a path or squeezing their hand, as well as asked to perform a motor activity (squeeze a rubber ball) as they gradually lost consciousness and regained it again after the propofol was stopped.
Previous research has shown that mental imagery produces brain activity similar to actually performing the activity. When participants imagine themselves playing tennis, the part of the brain responsible for controlling movement lights up. Other regions of the brain become deactivated when performing tasks, as mental attention is focused on the activity.
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