Brain's Gateway to Conscious Awareness Finally Revealed [STUDY]

The brain is the control center of the body. It processes everything from voluntary to involuntary actions, and it receives a near-constant influx of sensory information at various strengths from the environment during the waking hours.

For many years, scientists have wondered what part of the brain controls the gateway to conscious awareness that separates the light of consciousness and the dark of unconsciousness.

Researchers from the University of Michigan's Department of Anesthesiology and Center for Consciousness Science recently published a study entitled " Anterior insula regulates brain network transitions that gate conscious access," in Cell Reports that showed a key area in the brain's cortex that controls the gateway to conscious awareness.

How is Information Processed in the Brain?

According to Simply Psychology, information processing involves a stimulus, input process, storage process, output process, and response.

Input processes analyze the stimuli before it is stored. In storage processing, it covers everything that happens to the stimulus in the brain, like encoding and manipulation of stimuli. Then output processing is where an appropriate response to the stimulus is prepared.

Zirui Huang, Ph.D., research investigator at Michigan Medicine's Department of Anesthesiology, explains that information processing inside the brain is composed of two dimensions.

Medical Xpress reported that these are sensory processing of the environment without consciousness and information processing wherein a stimulus reaches a level that it enters the consciousness.

Lead researcher Anthony Hudetz, Ph.D., Huang, and their team conducted experiments to confirm a part of the brain that controls consciousness.

Testing Their Hypothesis

The medical science website reported, they put participants inside an fMRI machine and administered propofol, an anesthetic drug, to control their level of consciousness.

Participants were asked to imagine doing activities, such as playing tennis, walking, and squeezing their hands. They were also asked to perform a motor activity of squeezing a rubber ball as they gradually lose consciousness and regained it again when propofol was eliminated.

Previous studies showed that mental imagery produces similar brain activity to motor activity. Relating this to the experiment, the part of the brain that controls movement lights up when participants imagine playing tennis. Researchers observed that other regions get deactivated when participants were performing tasks.

That is because they focus on the activity. But when participants are gradually losing consciousness, deactivation happens less frequently. Then they lost all brain activation in response to mental imagery when they lost consciousness. When they awoke, their brain showed normal activation patterns.

Gateway to Conscious Awareness

Their experiment showed that these states of conscious awareness revealed activation in the anterior insular cortex plays a role in switching from activation to deactivation, Medical Xpress reported.

Hudetz said, "A sensory stimulus will normally activate the anterior insular cortex. But when you lose consciousness, the anterior insular cortex is deactivated and network shifts in the brain that support consciousness are disrupted." The team believes that the anterior insular cortex acts as a filter to important information that enters the consciousness.

To confirm this, they did another experiment wherein they briefly flash a face for three-hundredths of a second followed by a noisy high contrast image to interrupt conscious processing of the face image.

They asked participants whether they saw the face or not. They found that activation of the anterior insular cortex predicted whether the face image was consciously accessed or not.

Based on the evidence from two experiments, researchers concluded that the anterior insular cortex could be the gateway to conscious awareness.

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