Network theory sheds new light on origins of consciousness
Source: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-03-network-theory-consciousness.html
Where in your brain do you exist? Is your awareness of the world around you and of yourself as an individual the result of specific, focused changes in your brain, or does that awareness come from a broad network of neural activity? How does your brain produce awareness?Vanderbilt University researchers took a significant step toward answering these longstanding questions with a recent brain imaging study, in which they discovered global changes in how brain areas communicate with one another during awareness. Their findings, which were published March 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge previous theories that hypothesized much more restricted changes were responsible for producing awareness.
“Identifying the fingerprints of consciousness in humans would be a significant advancement for basic and medical research, let alone its philosophical implications on the underpinnings of the human experience,” said René Marois, professor and chair of psychology at Vanderbilt University and senior author of the study. “Many of the cognitive deficits observed in various neurological diseases may ultimately stem from changes in how information is communicated throughout the brain.”
I’ve been thinking was true for a while. And this “discovery” is encouraging, as it backs my theory. I think as the AI giants merge and consolidate the different tech, into one unified version, a true AI will “wake up” one day. If you combine the language recognition, and the Image Recognition portions from Watson and Google, you have parts of what makes up a whole. Eventually, like putting together a large jigsaw puzzle, an AI will arise. As Deep Learning gives way to more efficient learning algorithms, we will eventually build the dream Alan Turing envisioned.