Consciousness is something that is very difficult to study. While all of us know that we are conscious, understanding exactly what it is and how it works is difficult.

In many ways, the concept of consciousness is a subject that is better looked at philosophically than strictly scientifically. After all, it is often defined as the immediate awareness of our surroundings (including our experiences, emotions, and feelings).

Based on that, consciousness is something that is personal and subjective to each person. Science looks at things from an objective perspective, which can make it difficult.

Where science can offer helpful insights, however, is in learning how and why consciousness occurs, even if that doesn’t necessarily help with how each person experiences it.

To that end, Peter Coppola, a visiting neuroscience researcher at the University of Cambridge, conducted a review of over 100 years of research on the brain. In his exhaustive studies, he analyzed studies on humans, cats, monkeys, and much more. According to what he wrote in The Conversation, his goal was to provide a hierarchy of the brain, which would illustrate which regions were used in what ways for consciousness.

Perhaps surprisingly, what he found was that the common understanding throughout the medical and academic world seems to be almost entirely wrong.

Specifically, while there are different theories of how consciousness works, they all agree that the neocortex (the wrinkly outer part of the brain) is necessary. When Coppola looked at the evidence, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case. He wrote:

“people born without the cerebellum, or the front of their cortex, can still appear conscious and live quite normal lives. However, damaging the cerebellum later in life can trigger hallucinations or change your emotions completely.”

So, while consciousness may very well be reliant on the neocortex for those whose brains formed normally, it is not necessarily required for those who had some type of defect or abnormality from the earliest times of development.

The brain, it seems, can adapt based on how it develops to provide consciousness to people in more than one way. Perhaps the neocortex is the preferred area for generating consciousness, but if that is not available or is sufficiently defective, the brain can perform the function elsewhere (though where exactly is not known).

The review shows that neuroscientists need to take a step back and re-examine the evidence and perform new studies without previous assumptions. Coppola says:

“This means we may have to review our theories of consciousness. In turn, this may influence patient care as well as how we think about animal rights. In fact, consciousness might be more common than we realized.”

How this is to be done is another difficult topic. Studying the brain is notoriously hard since it is unethical to perform most types of experiments on people that could impact the brain. And studying consciousness in animals is not always helpful because they cannot provide real feedback on their subjective experiences.

While Coppola doesn’t provide answers, his review of the evidence does show that it is time to forget much of what was previously thought to be known. Sometimes, unlearning things is the most important first step toward finding the truth.

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