Consciousness depends on the function of what part of the brain?

Question

Consciousness depends on the function of what part of the brain?

Answer 1

As best as we know, the cerebral cortex.

Answer 2

Consciousness Depends On This Part Of The Brain

Answer 3

Yeah you need to be more specific. Like what type of creativity are you talking about, poetry, music, or problem solving? Imagination, what type sounds, visions, or sensations? With intuition there is no clear cut answer, for example would you call an autistic intuitive because they can grasp music very quickly and remember and play any piece they hear? Consciousness is not localized to a particular area of the brain. If certain parts of the brain were damaged or removed it is possible for the person to survive. Say for instance the Broca is damaged a person will still be able to live but they will not likely be creative as poets or be able to solve word puzzles. Humans are their brains, that whats make us different from all the other living creatures. If you removed the things that make us unique as animals then we would not likely act as a typical human. Your idea about "humans" not needing all the specialized areas of the brain at once is flawed because if all these areas are not present then you are a human in body only and not in mind.

Answer 4

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Consciousness depends on the function of what part of the brain?
Consciousness depends on the function of what part of the brain?

Answer 5

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You asked a question that I am actively pursuing in studies. I can honestly say that no one really knows the complete picture. We only know bits and pieces of the puzzle so far and no one has formulated the whole thing. I suspect that it is a question that will be answered over the next 50 years of study and research. Many people are working on it. There are over 26 different universities that have significant research going on in neuroscience, cognitive sciences, and related areas of several diverse fields of study, including phenomenological philosophy. The idea of localization of abilities have clearly been identified for specific things like motor, vision, hearing, and linguistic understanding and speech. Other talents like music, mathematics, and the creative arts seem to be a synesthesia of sorts that blends adjoining areas of the brain. Because of ethical reasons you cannot remove parts of people's brains for study, unless there are tumors that require it. So scientists often depend on lesions that occur by accidents or strokes and run volunteers who have suffered the lesions through a battery of tests. Using fMRI study of blood flow much can be determined what parts of the brain are active in normal people and patients. Some functions don't entirely seem to be localized. The sense of self may or may not be localized. We know that consciousness is not a monolithic thing so we would expect parts of it to show up in diverse parts of the brain if it were localized. But excision of most of those parts doesn't seem to eliminate all aspects of consciousness. Also after a stroke localized functions such as motor control seem to be able to relocate if extensive therapy is available. The brain appears to be a malleable thing and it is an evolving thing. Most of the mental skills of humans can be shown to exist in lower level animals who evolved long before humans did. Most of the mental abilities that we have as humans were developed in animals which preceded us in evolution. We humans, however, have mainly accomplished the honing and refining of mental abilities that already existed. A crow for example can count to about 5 but gets confused when you get up to 6 or higher. That is pretty good as most animals get confused above 3. Apes and chimps have abilities to develop limited language skills using sign language. It is clear that most animals have some sense of self, sense pain, and if they are social animals they all have empathy and a sense of morals. The real problem you might have with terms like creativity, imagination, intuition, and consciousness is that they are metaphors and mean slightly different things to different people. None of those terms are really scientific and while they help us make generalizations in every day talk, often those extrapolations veer us off into wrong directions in our research on thoughts and we end up baffled by contradictions.

Answer 6

I Think it Resides Primarily In the Parietal Lobes, but Needs to Be "Woken Up", This Resides In the Brain Stem, See the RAS (Reticular Activating System).

Answer 7

I'm not 100% sure, and it's a good question indeed, but I believe it would be in the frontal lobe of your cerebral cortex, seeing as it deals with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving.

Answer 8

Yes it is the reticular activating system

Answer 9

What are the relations between consciousness and the brain?
This question is the famous `mind-body problem'. Though it has a long and sordid history in both philosophy and science, I think, in broad outline at least, it has a rather simple solution. Here it is: Conscious states are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain and are themselves higher level features of the brain. The key notions here are those of cause and feature. As far as we know anything about how the world works, variable rates of neuron firings in different neuronal architectures cause all the enormous variety of our conscious life. All the stimuli we receive from the external world are converted by the nervous system into one medium, namely, variable rates of neuron firings at synapses. And equally remarkably, these variable rates of neuron firings cause all of the colour and variety of our conscious life. The smell of the flower, the sound of the symphony, the thoughts of theorems in Euclidian geometry -- all are caused by lower level biological processes in the brain; and as far as we know, the crucial functional elements are neurons and synapses.
Of course, like any causal hypothesis this one is tentative. It might turn out that we have overestimated the importance of the neuron and the synapse. Perhaps the functional unit is a column or a whole array of neurons, but the crucial point I am trying to make now is that we are looking for causal relationships. The first step in the solution of the mind-body problem is: brain processes cause conscious processes.

This leaves us with the question, what is the ontology, what is the form of existence, of these conscious processes? More pointedly, does the claim that there is a causal relation between brain and consciousness commit us to a dualism of `physical' things and `mental' things? The answer is a definite no. Brain processes cause consciousness but the consciousness they cause is not some extra substance or entity. It is just a higher level feature of the whole system. The two crucial relationships between consciousness and the brain, then, can be summarized as follows: lower level neuronal processes in the brain cause consciousness and consciousness is simply a higher level feature of the system that is made up of the lower level neuronal elements.

There are many examples in nature where a higher level feature of a system is caused by lower level elements of that system, even though the feature is a feature of the system made up of those elements. Think of the liquidity of water or the transparency of glass or the solidity of a table, for example. Of course, like all analogies these analogies are imperfect and inadequate in various ways. But the important thing that I am trying to get across is this: there is no metaphysical obstacle, no logical obstacle, to claiming that the relationship between brain and consciousness is one of causation and at the same time claiming that consciousness is just a feature of the brain. Lower level elements of a system can cause higher level features of that system, even though those features are features of a system made up of the lower level elements. Notice, for example, that just as one cannot reach into a glass of water and pick out a molecule and say `This one is wet', so, one cannot point to a single synapse or neuron in the brain and say `This one is thinking about my grandmother'. As far as we know anything about it, thoughts about grandmothers occur at a much higher level than that of the single neuron or synapse, just as liquidity occurs at a much higher level than that of single molecules.

Of all the theses that I am advancing in this article, this one arouses the most opposition. I am puzzled as to why there should be so much opposition, so I want to clarify a bit further what the issues are: First, I want to argue that we simply know as a matter of fact that brain processes cause conscious states. We don't know the details about how it works and it may well be a long time before we understand the details involved. Furthermore, it seems to me an understanding of how exactly brain processes cause conscious states may require a revolution in neurobiology. Given our present explanatory apparatus, it is not at all obvious how, within that apparatus, we can account for the causal character of the relation between neuron firings and conscious states. But, at present, from the fact that we do not know how it occurs, it does not follow that we do not know that it occurs. Many people who object to my solution (or dissolution) of the mind-body problem, object on the grounds that we have no idea how neurobiological processes could cause conscious phenomena. But that does not seem to me a conceptual or logical problem. That is an empirical/theoretical issue for the biological sciences. The problem is to figure out exactly how the system works to produce consciousness, and since we know that in fact it does produce consciousness, we have good reason to suppose that are specific neurobiological mechanisms by way of which it works.

There are certain philosophical moods we sometimes get into when it seems absolutely astounding that consciousness could be produced by electro-biochemical processes, and it seems almost impossible that we would ever be able to explain it in neurobiological terms. Whenever we get in such moods, however, it is important to remind ourselves that similar mysteries have occurred before in science. A century ago it seemed extremely mysterious, puzzling, and to some people metaphysically impossible that life should be accounted for in terms of mechanical, biological, chemical processes. But now we know that we can give such an account, and the problem of how life arises from biochemistry has been solved to the point that we find it difficult to recover, difficult to understand why it seemed such an impossibility at one time. Earlier still, electromagnetism seemed mysterious. On a Newtonian conception of the universe there seemed to be no place for the phenomenon of electromagnetism. But with the development of the theory of electromagnetism, the metaphysical worry dissolved. I believe that we are having a similar problem about consciousness now. But once we recognize the fact that conscious states are caused by neurobiological processes, we automatically convert the issue into one for theoretical scientific investigation. We have removed it from the realm of philosophical or metaphysical impossibility.

Answer 10

reticular activating system