“The Human Brain Project: Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness”

First, the doctors asked her to open and close one hand. Then they asked her to relax her hand. Maria Mazurkevich didn’t move – but the electrodes on her head showed that she had heard the doctors.

The electrodes had picked up electrical impulses from the brain, showing that the patient not only responded to what the doctors said, but also heard the difference between the requests.

So she was well aware of her surroundings – and the doctors got a unique insight into her consciousness.

The story of Maria Mazurkevich may help solve one of science’s greatest mysteries.

For thousands of years, the world’s bright minds have been trying to understand what consciousness is and where it resides. Some call it the soul, and many say it is a separate entity that can even leave the body.

Like other mental properties, consciousness probably resides in the brain – but unlike, say, our ability to recognize faces or formulate a sentence, consciousness is frustratingly elusive and impossible to locate in the jumble of nerve cells.

But a groundbreaking international project aims to change that.

Easy problems are hard

It is difficult to say what consciousness is. But an important feature of it is our feeling about the experience we have of the world. Psychologists and neurologists call these feelings qualia.

When we look at a ripe tomato, the brain registers light with a wavelength of 660 nanometers, which is red by definition. However, we do not experience the red color as a wavelength, but as an indefinable sense of ‘red’.

And when volatile chemicals from the tomato hit sensory cells in our nose, we don’t smell methyl salicylate and benzaldehyde, but a pleasant tomato smell.

Qualia concern the experience of color, sound, smell, taste and tickling, but also of falling in love or sadness, or the realization that you are now reading this article.

Understanding how qualia arise and are interpreted in the brain is what scientists call “the difficult problem of consciousness.” And it is probably not only solvable by natural sciences, but extends far into the abstract thinking of psychology and philosophy.

Unlike the somewhat more philosophical ‘difficult problem’, the ‘easy problems of consciousness’ are more concrete. The point here is not to understand how our experience of consciousness arises, but to identify the complex circuits in the brain that lead to our consciousness.

These problems are easy only in the sense that they are more tangible than the hard problem and can be approached using classical scientific methods. In all other respects they are almost insurmountable.

Fortunately, this challenge does not deter scientists. In one of the most ambitious science projects ever, researchers worldwide want to dig through every cell in the brain to find the seat of consciousness.

Soul hides in turbulence

The Human Brain Project is a collaboration of at least 500 scientists from 16 countries. The project aims, among other things, to map the 86 billion nerve cells of our brain and to investigate how communication between nerve cells determines our thoughts and behaviour.

The Human Brain Project has already made a number of important discoveries. In 2022, two researchers on the project, the Dane Morten Kringelbach and the Italian Gustavo Deco, looked at brain scans of more than 1,000 people to find out how information and energy flow through the nerve cells from one part of the brain to the other.

The researchers discovered that consciousness is a result of turbulence in the brain. That turbulence occurs when information and energy flows from the brain are chaotic in both time and space, allowing information to be transferred much more efficiently.

The phenomenon can be compared to soup, where the ingredients mix much faster if you beat in all directions rather chaotically than if you gently turn your spoon around in the pan.

So information and energy flows are more chaotic when people are fully conscious, and not in an unconscious state like deep sleep and coma.

It was also found that fully conscious subjects had a greater flow of information over long distances than subjects in a coma. And conversely, people in a coma had a greater flow of information over short distances in the brain.

In the sleeping subjects, the exchange of information over both short and long distances was low.

The discovery is a breakthrough, but what exactly it will mean for our understanding of consciousness is still unclear. Its significance will not become clear until we have a more complete picture of the brain.

Water indicates the main roads

A map of all neurons was still a dream until now. But with the latest advanced techniques, the Human Brain Project wants to realize that dream.

One of these techniques, 3D-PLI, was developed by the German physicist Markus Axer. The technique involves cutting the brains of dead people into slices and then taking pictures of each slice. The computer merges the images into a 3D model of the brain and all of its cells.

New techniques can also be used to map the brains of living people in unprecedented detail. For example, with a special kind of MRI scan, scientists can track the movements of water molecules along the nerve bundles.

The scanning method makes it clear how large and extensive the nerve pathways are. The thick bundles of nerves between two brain centers indicate that many signals are exchanged – so they are the main roads of the brain.

Thanks to this level of detail, it is much more precise to determine how the maze of electrical impulses in the brain gives rise to certain thoughts or emotions – and to our consciousness.

Doctors turn on consciousness

In addition to new techniques, this exploration of our consciousness also relies on extraordinary stories, such as that of Maria Mazurkevich. She appeared to be in a coma, but appeared to be conscious.

If the Human Brain Project researchers can scan the brains of people like them, we could gain more insight into how turbulence in the brain leads to consciousness – or how specific bundles of nerves create that special feeling we get when we experience the world .

That knowledge, in turn, can help us understand the mechanistic, ‘easy’, problems of consciousness. And if we understand that, we are also better able to solve the difficult, more philosophical problem.

The research will also have important practical applications. This will allow doctors to better determine which coma patients are fully conscious – or even reactivate the consciousness of people in coma.

At least for Maria Mazurkevich the story ended well.

After a week, her body began to follow the brain’s electrical signals so she could clench her hand when the doctors asked. And after a year she was completely recovered. Now she works as a pharmacist’s assistant.