Spindle cells for long-distance connectivity and consciousness
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005Another entry from the answers to Edge magazine’s question, “What do you believe is true even though you can’t prove it?”.
Stanislas Dehaene postulates that spindle cells, a type of neuron found in the anterior cingulate of humans and great apes, but not other primates, is fundamental to higher-order processing and consciousness. He postulates that these cells, which form connections through the cortex, fundamentally increase long-distance connectivity in the cortical network, which allows different brain areas to better intercommunicate.
One way that I think about this is that it allows consciousness to access information within a variety of brain areas. His way of putting this is, “we can mobilize, in a top-down manner, essentially any brain area and bring it into consciousness”.
He also believes that this increased long-distance connectivity leads to a qualitatively greater amout of spontaineous, reverberating activity in the cortical network, which corresponds to our ability to sustain a conscious narrative independent of external sensory and motor events, or, as he puts it, “the autonomy of consciousness”.
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