Mysterious Brain
As soon as I set about writing this editorial, I felt like my very first week at the publishing house. Back then, in September 2001, I had to find a suitable title for the first issue of the newly founded "Gehirn&Geist" magazine. I mentally began to go through the big questions of neuroscience and quickly had the answer - clearly: "In Search of Consciousness"!
Nearly two decades later, the topic is still one of the great unsolved mysteries of science. How does nearly three pounds of gooey nerve tissue manage to create a sense of self? For decades, neuroscientists have been searching for the "neural correlates of consciousness" in the brain without finding a definitive answer. What is so special about this organ made up of almost 100 billion nerve cells compared to other tissues? Just the sheer number of cells? Not necessarily, because around three quarters of all brain neurons are located in the cerebellum, which plays no role in consciousness. The special neuronal circuitry in the cerebral cortex seems to be more important here. The neuroscientist Christof Koch, director of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, reports on page 12 on the current state of research on the subject and presents the two most popular theories of how consciousness develops in the brain.
In addition, our mind is constantly busy assembling the incoming sensory impressions into an image of the world around us. According to more recent findings, however, this process runs backwards to a certain extent, as cognition researcher Anil Seth from the University of Sussex describes from p. 18 onwards. As a result, the brain first makes predictions about the environment and only then compares them with the sensory signals. So we all live in a kind of controlled hallucination and in our own unique world. This could not only explain social phenomena such as filter bubbles on the Internet, but also the emergence of mental disorders such as schizophrenia. In these patients, the inner hypothesis dominates in such a way that it is no longer corrected according to environmental information and develops a life of its own. That's what we call delusion.
These two articles kick off our new series on exploring the human brain and what it does.
Wishing you mind-expanding reading
Your
Hartwig Hanser
