{"id":201921,"date":"2024-12-19T13:12:19","date_gmt":"2024-12-19T19:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/this-doctor-says-he-knows-how-the-brain-creates-consciousness-new-evidence-suggests-hes-on-to-something"},"modified":"2024-12-19T13:12:19","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T19:12:19","slug":"this-doctor-says-he-knows-how-the-brain-creates-consciousness-new-evidence-suggests-hes-on-to-something","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/this-doctor-says-he-knows-how-the-brain-creates-consciousness-new-evidence-suggests-hes-on-to-something","title":{"rendered":"This Doctor Says He Knows How the Brain Creates Consciousness. New Evidence Suggests He\u2019s On to Something"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

For nearly his entire life,<\/strong> Dr. Stuart Hameroff has been fascinated with the bedeviling question of consciousness.<\/strong> But instead of studying neurology or another field commonly associated with the inner workings of the brain, it was Hameroff\u2019s familiarity with anesthetics, a family of drugs that famously induces the opposite<\/em> of consciousness, that fueled his curiosity.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought about neurology, psychology, and neurosurgery, but none of those\u2026 eemed to be dealing with the problem of consciousness<\/a>,\u201d says Hameroff, a now-retired professor of anesthesiology from the University of Arizona. Hameroff recalls a particularly eye-opening moment when he first arrived at the university and met the chairman of the anesthesia department. \u201cHe says \u2018hey, if you want to understand consciousness, figure out how anesthesia works because we don\u2019t have a clue.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Hameroff\u2019s work in anesthesia showed that unconsciousness occurred due to some effect on microtubules and wondered if perhaps these structures somehow played a role in forming consciousness. So instead of using the neuron, or the brain\u2019s nerve cells, as the \u201cbase unit\u201d of consciousness, Hameroff\u2019s ideas delved deeper and looked at the billions of individual tubulins inside microtubules<\/a> themselves. He quickly became obsessed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For nearly his entire life, Dr. Stuart Hameroff has been fascinated with the bedeviling question of consciousness. But instead of studying neurology or another field commonly associated with the inner workings of the brain, it was Hameroff\u2019s familiarity with anesthetics, a family of drugs that famously induces the opposite of consciousness, that fueled his curiosity. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/692"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}