In July, researchers reported a strange discovery that helped unlock one of the great mysteries of the mind: consciousness. Mohamad Koubeissi, a neurologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues were trying to identify seizure sources in an epileptic patient's brain by electrically stimulating different regions. To the researchers' surprise, the patient temporarily lost consciousness when they stimulated an area of the brain called the claustrum, located just below the cortex (the outer layer of the brain). "It was striking," Koubeissi says. "All cognition and awareness appeared to become paralyzed, with a complete return to baseline once we turned the stimulation off." He repeated the experiment at least 10 times, with the same result.
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