What if your body were to be swapped whilst retaining the conscious, will that still be you?
What makes you you?
That is a question asked in John Scalzi’s sci-fi thriller, Old Man’s War
Is it your consciousness that makes you you?
If so, what exactly is consciousness, and how can we study it through the brain?
In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies and a beaming, blue-green sea.
He hoped to win another Nobel do the same thing for consciousness.
Can we identify consciousness with neural activity?
On his deathbed in 2005, Crick, published a final article -it proposed the claustrum, a set of neurons coincidentally shaped like a hammock, as the seat of consciousness
It took a few more years to show that the claustrum may not be the seat of consciousness, but it could still be a kind of chauffeur for it.
It is a question that still continues to puzzle neuroscientists
“It’s just that difficult to imagine how subjective experience can arise from basic physical elements like atoms and molecules”
What do you think makes you, you?
#reviewswithranjani
#neuroscience
Sources :
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02207-1
https://nautil.us/issue/79/catalysts/where-is-my-mind
https://www.nature.com/articles/nn0800_743
What Makes You You?