Neuroscientist Says We’re All Wrong About Root of Consciousness in Our Brains

If you don’t know anything about neuroscience, that’s okay — one researcher’s striking theory might send us all back to the start anyway.

Peter Coppola is a visiting neuroscience researcher at the University of Cambridge, where he recently finished a review of over 100 years of brain science. The goal, he wrote afterward in The Conversation, was to chart a hierarchy of the brain, to see which regions were more important for consciousness.

To undertake the exhaustive study, Coppola turned over every rock in the field of neuroscience, from extreme surgical studies of cats and monkeys to the effect of electrical pulses and magnetic stimulation on the brain. The results of his survey, he says, is a body of evidence that challenges the most widely understood theories of consciousness to date.