The ‘conscious pilot’ – Dendritic synchrony moving through the brain mediates consciousness, showing a path to the Singularity
10:50-11:10 am, October 3
The brain computes cognitive functions including sensory perception and control of behavior. These cognitive functions are sometimes accompanied by consciousness, and other times not (‘auto-pilot’). For example we walk, drive or perform various behaviors non-consciously on auto-pilot while our conscious mind wanders. As a metaphor, an airplane flies on auto-pilot while the (conscious) pilot daydreams or moves through the cabin. When an alarm sounds, the conscious pilot returns to the cockpit to resume monitoring and control. In the brain, non-conscious auto-pilot cognition is explained by ‘neurocomputation’ , axonal firings and synaptic transmissions acting as bit states and switches in computers. But what in the brain is the wandering conscious pilot? The best measurable correlate of consciousness is gamma synchrony EEG which indeed rapidly moves and redistributes throughout the brain. Gamma synchrony derives not from neurocomputation, but from groups of neuronal dendrites (and glia) transiently fused by electrical synapses called gap junctions, more or less sideways to the flow of neurocomputation.
The conscious pilot model suggests that, as gap junctions open and close, spatiotemporal envelopes of dendritic synchrony move and self-organize through input/integration layers of the brain’s neuronal networks/global workspace, providing a mobile, semi-autonomous intelligence correlating with conscious perception and action. Similar ideas of executive agents moving through computational manifolds have come from AI, for example Goertzel’s ‘bubble of awareness’ in the Novamente system, and Milner/Bonzon ‘pi processes’. Intelligent machines could utilize mobile agents (somewhat like computer worms) patterned after synchronized gap junction networks in the brain (Ebner & Hameroff, in preparation).
Biographies: Stuart Hameroff
Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona known for his promotion of the scientific study of consciousness, and his theories of the mechanisms of consciousness. From 1975 onwards, he has spent the whole of his career at the University of Arizona, becoming professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Psychology and Director for the Center for Consciousness Studies, both in 1999, and finally Emeritus professor for Anesthesiology and Psychology in 2003.
