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Brains might sync as people interact — and that could upend consciousness research

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https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/br...sciousness

EXCERPTS: People synchronize in various ways when we interact with one another. [...] Surprisingly, people synchronize their neural rhythms, too. Researchers like Tom Froese, a cognitive scientist from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, think that these findings could upend our current models of consciousness.

[...] A potential explanation: Functional links across brains increase when people work together, but not for those who are competing or taking on identical tasks simultaneously.

[...] As most neuroscientists currently understand, no localized region or network in the brain is solely responsible for our conscious experience. Instead, some researchers believe that the neural basis of consciousness — specifically the first-hand experience of it — comes from large-scale interactions between different brain regions via neural oscillatory activity.

That would render consciousness an emergent property of multiple interacting networks, so it couldn’t be reduced to any single network. Given this knowledge, along with the changes that transpire during cooperative social interactions, Froese argues that a shift in our understanding of consciousness is warranted. Namely, he supports an ‘extension of consciousness’.

Froese isn’t suggesting that consciousness lacks a neural basis; however, an individual’s neural activity is embodied in their interactions with the world. Now, we realize that other people may play a role.

The conscious mind’s boundaries could also be under constant renegotiation during exchanges with the environment and other people, Froese explained in a 2020 Neuroscience of Consciousness article. When we socialize, inter-brain synchronization neurally binds us together and extends consciousness.

“An upshot of this proposal is that it can potentially validate our most intimate experiences: When we become aware that ‘we’ are sharing a moment with someone else, it is no longer necessarily the case that we are fundamentally separated by our distinct heads — we could really be be two individuals sharing in one and the same unfolding experience,” he wrote.

Froese’s ideas build on a school of thought called complex systems theory, which would agree that consciousness emerges from multiple interacting brain networks.

He goes a step further by asserting that certain characteristics central to our experience of consciousness, like our deep sense of social connectedness, cannot be explained by reducing the system to one individual brain. Similarly, water can’t be reduced to its components of hydrogen and oxygen because the two complex systems’ interactions drive its complex behavior.

The mainstream neuroscience field hasn’t yet accepted these ideas, though... (MORE - details)
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