Sigmund Freud and the Crick-Koch hypothesis

[anhinga_anhinga]

"Sigmund Freud and the Crick-Koch hypothesis. A footnote to the history of consciousness studies"

Some ideas might be quite old:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10407749&dopt=Abstract

Int J Psychoanal. 1999 Jun;80 ( Pt 3):543-8

Smith DL

The author describes Crick and Koch's recently developed theory of the neurophysiological basis of consciousness as synchronised neural oscillations. The thesis that neural oscillations provide the neurophysiological basis for consciousness was anticipated by Sigmund Freud in his 1895 'Project for a scientific psychology'. Freud attempted to solve his neuropsychological 'problem of quality' by means of the hypothesis that information concerning conscious sensory qualities is transmitted through the mental apparatus by means of neural 'periods'. Freud believed that information carried by neural oscillations would proliferate across 'contact-barriers' (synapses) without inhibition. Freud's theory thus appears to imply that synchronised neural oscillations are an important component of the neurophysiological basis of consciousness. It is possible that Freud's thesis was developed in response to the experimental research of the American neuroscientist M. M. Garver.

Comments

[spamsink.livejournal.com]

Do they touch on stability of such oscillations? Apparently, as waking from anesthesia happens spontaneously as soon as the concentration drops, and even after a serious trauma, spontaneous waking can happen after a considerable period of time, it means that the oscillatory state of the brain is at the bottom of quite a deep valley of possible states. It is somewhat surprising, then, that the oscillatory state of the heart, which is much older phylogenetically, is not that stable. There are some arrythmias that can correct themselves, but very few, let alone fibrillation. And I won't even start on Commotio cordis.

To summarize, I don't believe the oscillation theory much.

[anhinga-anhinga.livejournal.com]

I am not sure whether Crick and Koch investigated stability, but there is a huge body of research made by other people. There are stable modes and unstable modes, and modes with their stability depending on parameters...

The only "problem" is that all this is not even close to the simplicity of the original Crick-Koch conjecture (that a single gamma oscillation underlies visual attention and, thus, enables visual consciousness). There are dozens of known oscillation modes in the neural tissue, with different mechanisms and different cognitive significance, including quite a few of different gammas (frequency can be the same)...

So to the extent that Crick hoped to get a simple underlying picture here, like he did with double helix or genetic code for proteins which are simple, and then to have complexity of top of an underlying simple picture, this did not happen so far in neuro...