Scientists believe they may have accidentally found the key in the human brain that, when turned or tweaked the right way, seems to switch our consciousness on and off.
A team led by Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University was working with a patient with epilepsy, placing electrodes deep in her brain in an attempt to determine where seizures were originating.
According to the New Scientist, high-frequency electrical impulses were delivered to a region of the patient's brain next to the claustrum, an area that had never been stimulated before. What happened next was a little bizarre.
The woman remained awake, but lost consciousness. She stopped the reading she was in the midst of and stared blankly as her breathing slowed and she failed to respond to visual or audio cues. Quite simply, she had been "shut off" like so many androids in bad science fiction and seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open.
Once the electrical stimulation of the woman's claustrum ceased, she immediately "woke up" with no memory of the period. The researchers were able to replicate the same effect every time they stimulated the area during two days of experiments. The results were published last week in the journal Epilepsy and Behavior.
"I would liken it to a car," Koubeissi told New Scientist. "A car on the road has many parts that facilitate its movement... but there's only one spot where you turn the key and it all switches on and works together... we may have found the key."
But this single case, which involved a patient who had already had part of her brain's hippocampus removed to treat her epilepsy, can hardly be considered conclusive proof of anything just yet.
Nonetheless, the research is undeniably intriguing and Koubeissi plans to investigate further into the claustrum's potential to be the key to treating epileptic seizures.
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