Systems of Oscillators Designed for a Specific Conscious Percept

Summary

Scientists have discovered a fascinating way to model how our brains create conscious experiences of space using interconnected rhythmic signals. By designing networks of synchronized oscillators that mirror how we perceive spatial relationships, researchers demonstrated how neural patterns could generate our conscious awareness of location and distance. This breakthrough in q-bio.NC advances our understanding of how physical brain activity creates conscious experience.

Abstract

As put forward by neuroscientists, the mechanisms of consciousness can be elucidated by revealing correlations between neural dynamics and specific conscious percepts. Recently, I have elaborated on the mathematical formulation for a system of processes that are mutually connected to be isomorphic to a conscious percept of a point in space. Importantly, in such a system, any process can be derived through all other processes that form its complement, or interpretation. To generate such a solution, I am proposing a dynamical system of oscillators coupled in a manner to preserve the properties of a percept. Specifically, I crafted a dynamical system that retains the mutual relationships among processes, forming an operational map isomorphic to a distance matrix that mimics a percept of space-like properties. The study and results pave a novel way to analyze the dynamics of neural-like (oscillatory) processes with a purpose of extracting the information relevant to specific conscious percepts, which will facilitate the search for neural correlates of consciousness.

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