Electric wave engulfs brain at first blush of consciousness | YaleNews
▻https://news.yale.edu/2018/02/27/electric-wave-engulfs-brain-first-blush-consciousness
Our brains are bombarded with information about events around us, but we only become conscious of a few of them. Yale researchers have captured what happens in the split second before the emergence of consciousness, a fundamental state of human life.
“There is a very tight window of a few milliseconds when we come aware of stimuli and before the experience is passed on to be coded in our memory and analyzed,” said Dr. Hal Blumenfeld, the Mark Loughridge and Michele Williams Professor of Neurology and senior author of the research published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.
At that precise moment, a wave of electrical activity flows from the visual cortex in the rear of the brain to the frontal lobes, the Yale team reports. When stimuli do not trigger consciousness, the visual cortex is activated but no wave is seen and information is not passed on. In the milliseconds when subjects become conscious of a stimulus and the wave begins, the visual cortex switches off — as does brain’s default mode, when the brain is idling and processing internal thoughts.