Boing Boing, November 8, 2024

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The secret of consciousness may be found in the strange electric fields inside our skulls

Allan Rose Hill / 11:23 am PT Fri Nov 8, 2024

For decades, neuroscientists have focused on neuron firing—tiny "spikes" of voltage—as the way information is transmitted in the brain. These spikes are thought to play a foundational role in generating conscious experiences by enabling communication, integration, and processing across networks of neurons. According to some researchers though, consciousness may not be solely generated by firing neurons but may instead emerge from the complex electric fields they produce.

Traditional thinking is that neurons communicate by releasing neurotransmitters across synapses, the physical junctions that connect them. But "ephatic field effects" are a form of neuron communication where electric fields generated by one neuron influence the activity of nearby neurons without synaptic contact.

There's incredible evidence to support this! For example, in 2019, Case Western Reserve neuroscientist Dominique Durand led a study showing that even after cutting up a mouse's brain, communication continued across the slice through field effects. And there are more.

Tamlyn Hunt, a UC Santa Barbara researcher on consciousness and philosophy, writes in Scientific American:

Walter Freeman, a legendary now-deceased neuroscientist from the University of California, Berkeley, stated in a 2006 paper that traditional synaptic firing speeds could not explain the speed of cognitive functions he had observed over the years in rabbits and cats.

Another recent paper including as authors the University of California, Los Angeles's Costas Anastassiou and former Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch, provides strong support for the importance of ephaptic effects. They find that, indeed, ephaptic coupling can explain the "fast coordination" required for consciousness "even in the absence of very fast synapses."

This single paper could take the field of ephaptic field science from the fringes of neuroscience to the forefront. Its findings regarding the speed and pervasiveness of ephaptic field effects may presage a fundamentally new understanding of how cognition and consciousness work.

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