Jad Abumrad

There was just one really, really clear motif that appeared.

They saw this wave of electricity sweeping across the brain.

So when people went under, their brains just started to ring like a bell, basically.

And why would those, what are those waves doing exactly?

It seems like those waves might be imposing a kind of deadly order on the brain.

This is the thing that's very counterintuitive.

You think that consciousness is order and synchrony.

Yeah.

It turns out that it's kind of the opposite.

The consciousness is actually chaotic and noisy.

It's all of those different parts of the brain, you know, facial recognition, touch, sound, language, engaged in this crazily complicated, multilayered conversation.

You know, it's one person talking, the other one talking back.

This is Carl Zimmer again, and he says one of the hallmarks of the conscious brain is that you see a kind of conversational logic, a back and forth between the different parts.

Yeah, my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn.

The things you're seeing create signals in the back of your head.

They will go to the front of your head, back again.

forward and back, and forward and back, and forward and back, and forward and back.

And you can use this eavesdropping to calculate how connected the brain is, what they call connectivity.

And when you're awake, you have a lot of connectivity.

When you're dreaming, you also have a lot of connectivity.