> "Counter-intuitively, Koubeissi's team found that the woman's loss of consciousness was associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness. Although different areas of the brain are thought to synchronise activity to bind different aspects of an experience together, too much synchronisation seems to be bad. The brain can't distinguish one aspect from another, stopping a cohesive experience emerging."
Right, counter-intuitively... As long as we'll be making up reasons based on that piece of data, how about this:
Global synchrony occurs when a brain is recovering from an unknown or detected bad state, and all major parts of the brain say "HLO" to each other to notify for their existence, proper operation and to establish connection. So it's not that it's bad to be synchronous, but the lack of information from critical parts of the brain causes it to repeatedly reboot in order to recover from a bad state forced by electric rods in the brain.
Hey, I'm a scientist!
Seriously though, why aren't we thinking about what the implications of our experimental data would be on a distributed computing system, which our brain is, instead of giving silly "it's like the key in a car" explanations, assigning causality randomly and without merit?
The result isn't counter-intuitive to those familiar with fairly basic human neuroscience. When you close your eyes, for example, low frequency, long-range synchronization also increases.
The stated "counter-intuitive"-ness is more likely an artifact of the translation of the result to layman's terms, where the traditional (since the industrial revolution) way of thinking about the brain and mind is that it is a machine, and the function of this machine is consciousness. I think several such artifacts often appear in these sorts of articles on neuroscience.
If you wish to actually understand and interpret the results for yourself, without the crude and inevitably inaccurate lens of the science writer, you have to read some of the books written by neuroscientists themselves. Rhythms of the Brain by Gyorgy Buzsaki is the best I've read so far.
And yet, nothing you said really rejects my made up explanation, even more, it supports it (the visual center stops sending information as it lacks input, and synchronization attempts begin).
Right, counter-intuitively... As long as we'll be making up reasons based on that piece of data, how about this:
Global synchrony occurs when a brain is recovering from an unknown or detected bad state, and all major parts of the brain say "HLO" to each other to notify for their existence, proper operation and to establish connection. So it's not that it's bad to be synchronous, but the lack of information from critical parts of the brain causes it to repeatedly reboot in order to recover from a bad state forced by electric rods in the brain.
Hey, I'm a scientist!
Seriously though, why aren't we thinking about what the implications of our experimental data would be on a distributed computing system, which our brain is, instead of giving silly "it's like the key in a car" explanations, assigning causality randomly and without merit?