If you close your eyes and cover your ears, it can feel like most of the world has disappeared – yet you yourself remain completely present, in your own head.
This awareness of your own experience is considered one of the fundamental components of whatever it is that makes us human – what it means to be a conscious being, rather than an organism driven by pure reaction.
One of humanity's deepest unanswered questions is: Where does this consciousness come from? How did it evolve? And how many other beings on this world of ours share a similar awareness of their individual experience of living?
Traditionally, neuroscience views the cerebral cortex – the folded, squishy outer layer of the brain – as the so-called "seat of consciousness", from which our subjective experience of the world is thought to arise.
But what if the true origin of consciousness lies somewhere far deeper and older?
That question forms the basis of a new paper by neuroscientists Marshall Devor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Mark Baron of Harvard Medical School, who argue that we may have been looking for the human sense of self in the wrong place.
And if consciousness arises in the brainstem, as their argument suggests, then maybe its origins are not quite so human after all.
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