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A new dynamic property of human consciousness

UnCheol Lee¹, Seunghwan Kim², Gyu-Jeong Noh³, & Byung-Moon Choi⁴

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1. Max Plank Institute for the physics of complex systems
2. Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics&Nonlinear Complex Systems Laboratory, National Core Research Center on System Biodynamics, Department of Physics, POSTECH
3. Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine
4. Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, National Medical Center

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Date:

Received 20 October 2007 15:29 UTC; Posted 24 October 2007

Subjects:

Neuroscience

Tags:

• neural state
• state space
• Consciousness
• brain
• EEG

Abstract:

As pointed out by William James, “the consciousness is a dynamic process, not a thing” , during which short term integration is succeeded by another differentiated neural state through the continual interplay between the environment, the body, and the brain itself. Thus, the dynamic structure underlying successive states of the brain is important for understanding human consciousness as a process. In order to investigate the dynamic property of human consciousness, we developed a new method to reconstruct a state space from electroencephalogram(EEG), in which a trajectory, reflecting states of consciousness, is constructed based on the global information integration of the brain. EEGs were obtained from 14 subjects received an intravenous bolus of propopol. Here we show that the degree of human consciousness is directly associated with the information integration capacity of gamma wave, which is significantly higher in the conscious state than in the unconscious state. And we found a new time evolutional property of human consciousness. The conscious state showed a lower dimensional dynamic process which changed to a random-like process after loss of consciousness. This characteristic dynamic property, appeared only in the gamma band, might be used as an indicator to distinguish the conscious and unconscious states and also considered as an important fact for the human consciousness model.

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License

How to cite this document:

Lee, UnCheol , Kim, Seunghwan, Noh, Gyu-Jeong, and Choi, Byung-Moon. A new dynamic property of human consciousness. Available from Nature Precedings <http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2007.1244.1> (2007)

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