Wider human consciousness as shown by death and dying

Consciousness is now one of the central strands in the neuroscience agenda. The current interest in chronic vegetative states, and the ways that consciousness can be enhanced by peripheral and cortical stimulation, suggest that we may have to re-think the mechanisms of coma. A recent paper (Rosenberg 2009), looking at consciousness, coma and brain death, draws together the current strands of neuroscience thinking. However, he is very bold when claiming that ‘There is no separate mind from the brain, the mind is the brain. Cartesian logic of a separate mind and brain is an archaic philosophical concept, displaced by current functional magnetic resonance imaging, deep brain stimulation studies, years of meticulous neuropathologic studies, and experimental neurophysiological animal studies that have proven that consciousness and mind are embedded into specific neuro-anatomical arousal behavioural circuits … It is now clear that coma, consciousness and cognition are neural-directed constructs and probably results form mathematical computations yet to be discovered.