Scientists think they have found a brain region that regulates conscious perception

Team Scientists identified the brain areas that are activated when a person realizes themselves and their thoughts. This enigmatic process seems to be controlled by the hill, the central region of the brain already known from its function as a filter between sensory signals and the cerebral cortex, part of the brain that rules the processes of higher levels, such as memory, thought and personality.

Conscious perception is people’s ability to realize stimuli received by their senses. This is a different state than just outrage in which the feelings are processed automatically and unreflective. Rather, conscious perception requires a detailed and voluntary analysis of external stimuli. For example, we can breathe automatically, but we can also be aware of our breathing and modify its rhythm. Similarly, by listening to the songs, we can draw attention and differentiate the instruments that compose it.

Recently, neurologists decided to find part of the brain in which this change of perception occurs. Scientists have traditionally suspected that such a function must be controlled by cerebral cortex, because there is advanced brain processing there. Talamus has never been excluded from being involved in conscious perception, but he was usually assigned a tiny role as a filter that prepares sensory information for the bark. A modern study recently published in Science He will redefine this view, positioning the hill as an energetic participant in conscious perception.

Most research of consciousness involving the hill faced skepticism, or because they lack key observation data of the hill at work, or if they are evidence with data, due to the controversial way in which these data were probably obtained. To check whether the patient’s brain region “lights up” with activity, paying at something aware of the attention, it is necessary for the patient to be aware of stimuli – it is aware – at the same time brain examination with invasive sensors.

But in these modern studies, the team from Beijal Normal University in China turned to a group of people who already had gaunt electrodes introduced to their brain as part of experimental therapy of headache, bypassing the ethical question whether such studies justify an invasive surgery.

Scientists conducted a visual test of perception to these patients. A flashing object is displayed on the screen that would hide for half the test time. These features meant that patients had to pay attention to the object and adapt their eyes and focus on observing it, and not just consider the screen without analysis. In this way, this facilitated conscious perception, and already implanted electrodes record brain activity that accompanies it.

Scientists say that this is one of the first simultaneous records of conscious perception, and the information they registered, as they say, contain robust evidence of the hypothesis that the hill region works the type of gate for conscious perception. “Discoveries indicate that the intra -medium and medial hill testicles regulate conscious perception. This conclusion is a significant progress in our understanding of the network, which is the basis of visual awareness in humans,” the authors write.

This story originally appeared Wired in Spanish and was translated from Spanish.