Electrical Currents Make Us Conscious, But Machines Are Another Matter

Self-awareness is the function of an electrical current in the brain, according to a recent study that focused on lucid dreams to research human consciousness. Don’t be too quick to say “singularity,” though—seriously, don’t say it—because understanding where consciousness occurs in the brain doesn’t mean that we can replicate it in machines.

The University of Göttingen-based team was investigating how “higher order consciousness”—abstract thinking and reflexivity—is generated by electrical currents called gamma waves. The researchers fired low-level currents through test subjects’ frontal lobes, mimicking the gamma band, to induce self-awareness in unconscious patients. In other words, they made the test subjects have lucid dreams. The study found that conscious awareness is induced at 40hz, suggesting that human subjectivity is the result of electrical stimulation, or at least in part.

“When subjects become lucid, they expand their conscious awareness, [and] they gain elements of secondary consciousness,” said Ursula Voss, the lead author of the paper. Gamma waves have previously been found to be active during deep sleep but their relationship to subjective consciousness wasn’t clear until now.

Understanding human consciousness is a key point of concern for AI researchers, and so I immediately recognized how Voss’s findings might look to a believer in the singularity. It’s tempting to claim that since consciousness is generated by an electrical current that stimulates the right inputs, machines could one day be built to possess it.

Although researchers have mapped the brain in extreme detail and we now know which part of the brain is connected with our self-awareness, we still don’t know what that actually means. Consciousness is an elusive and complex subject, and we’ve only just begun to understand it. As David Brooks put it in a New York Times op-ed, “the brain is not the mind.”

Claiming that consciousness can be explained by mapping brain activity is a position that psychiatrist Sally Satel has called “neurocentrism.” The idea doesn’t hold water, some neuroscientists claim, because brain activity is often dispersed throughout the brain and in variable formations.

As José van Djick argued in her article “Memory Matters in the Digital Age,” the brain is less like a computer and more like a symphony; it continually plays variations on a theme when it comes to activities like recalling memory. Even if we can track brain activity, we can’t describe the processes that occur.

It's a problem that has major ramifications for artificial intelligence. Heretofore, researchers and engineers have improved machine intelligence step-by-step, and the possibility that the human brain could somehow be reversed-engineered directly has remained elusive. While the new study sheds new light on electrical processes in the brain, it's definitely not proof that we're closer to computers than we thought.

“I would hope that [the research] would find application in states of reduced conscious awareness in humans, but robotics… I know nothing about this field,” Voss said. Her research focuses on concerns that are more immediate and human than futuristic and mechanical. The technology could be used for “basic research and also clinical applications, both for nightmare treatment and possibly also for OCD and major depression.”

When I asked Voss if she’s tried the technology herself (and if it was fun, obviously), she said that she has, but only in higher doses and while awake. “Subjects did like it,” she said. We’re still a long way from creating machines with higher consciousness, but by understanding what triggers it in humans we’re closer to effectively treating some serious issues in our species. And, apparently, we could have some fun with the technology, too.