[LINK] Claustrum Stimulation Temporarily Turns Off Consciousness in an otherwise Awake Patient

Personally I have never understood why people keep acting and talking as if consciousness were binary.

I agree and I don't think that's what anyone claims it here. What is interesting is that one small area of her brain can be reversibly affected in a way that completely removes both consciousness and memory formation while keeping the person awake otherwise, which is very much different from sedation or general anaesthesia.

Yet people keep asking things like "do animals have consciousness?" and I keep wondering if I'm missing something or if the answer is just really obviously "yes to varying degrees depending on the animal but almost always less than humans do."

I don't think serious neuroscientists ask questions like that, and yes, the obvious answer better be correct.

For what it's worth, you're not the only one who doesn't think consciousness is binary.

Here's a thread on it on felicifa.org.

From a medical perspective, the question of whether rather than to what degree a patient is conscious has serious ethical/practical importance. Basically, to treat a conscious patient you need his/her consent, for an unconscious one you don't, because you're excused for not getting it. So that variable, in a binary sense, is something every medical researcher is very aware of.

I agree that it is not ideal as a measure of how well someone is able to integrate information into his/her subjective worldmap (or however you want to define consciousness), but it is very available.

There are at least two distinct senses in which consciousness can be binary. The first sense is the kind you are probably thinking about: the range between e.g. insects, dogs, and humans, or maybe between early and late-stage Alzheimers.

The second sense is the kind that your interlocutors are (I surmise) thinking about. Imagine this: A being that is functionally exactly like you, and that is experiencing exactly what you are experiencing, except that it is experiencing everything "only half as much." It still behaves the same way as you, and it still thinks the same way as you; it's just that it's thoughts only count half.

If this sounds ridiculous to you, well, then you agree with your interlocutors. :) Personally, I think that there IS such a thing as partial consciousness in the sense described above, and I can link you to literature if you like.

EDIT: The place to start is Nick Bostrom's "Quantity of Experience: Brain Duplication and Degrees of Consciousness," available for free online.

EDIT: But the people who ask "Do animals have consciousness" are probably talking about the first kind, in which case I share your frustration. The second kind is more what people talk about when they ask e.g. "Could a machine have consciousness?"

Right, it seems similar. However, the memory of absence seizures is partially retained, so consciousness is not necessarily completely off:

while verbal responses were very often interrupted during seizures, some patients recalled questions or commands given during a seizure, and responded appropriately after the seizure ended

See also this review:

electrical stimulation of the claustrum, in a conscious patient with intractable complex partial epilepsy undergoing a preoperative investigation, produces a clinical state of immobility and complete lack of interaction with the environment, but retainment of some automatic movements, quite similar to cases of partial complex seizures.

There are speculations, certainly. But so far this is one experiment on one epileptic patient with a piece of hippocampus removed in an attempt to control her seizures. This is a long way away from reliably and reversibly switching off consciousness and memory formation on demand.

Is that actually the same thing? I was under hypnosis once, and it wasn't that I wasn't thinking at all, just less. I would expect not conscious to mean I had no awareness of what is going on.

I don't think this is the same. There is no memory of the event with the electrical stimulation and my (very limited) impression of hypnosis is that there's nothing about the process in itself that stops you from being able to remember.

It works, but intermittently. I suspect issues at Science Direct.

Abstract, just in case:

Abstract The neural mechanisms that underlie consciousness are not fully understood. We describe a region in the human brain where electrical stimulation reproducibly disrupted consciousness. A 54-year-old woman with intractable epilepsy underwent depth electrode implantation and electrical stimulation mapping. The electrode whose stimulation disrupted consciousness was between the left claustrum and anterior-dorsal insula. Stimulation of electrodes within 5 mm did not affect consciousness. We studied the interdependencies among depth recording signals as a function of time by nonlinear regression analysis (h2 coefficient) during stimulations that altered consciousness and stimulations of the same electrode at lower current intensities that were asymptomatic. Stimulation of the claustral electrode reproducibly resulted in a complete arrest of volitional behavior, unresponsiveness, and amnesia without negative motor symptoms or mere aphasia. The disruption of consciousness did not outlast the stimulation and occurred without any epileptiform discharges. We found a significant increase in correlation for interactions affecting medial parietal and posterior frontal channels during stimulations that disrupted consciousness compared with those that did not. Our findings suggest that the left claustrum/anterior insula is an important part of a network that subserves consciousness and that disruption of consciousness is related to increased EEG signal synchrony within frontal–parietal networks.

The paper itself is paywalled, if someone feels like posting full text some place accessible, by all means.

Seeme like as good a definition of consciousness as any.

The article noted it was high frequency stimulus that had the effect, and seemed to be disrupting normal function.

The article also says the patient was awake.