Do psychic cells generate consciousness?
This work addresses the fundamental problem of how consciousness arises in the brain, which is of interest to neuroscientists and philosophers, but it is incremental as it builds on historical ideas and recent reviews.
The paper reviews recent progress in understanding cellular-level mechanisms of consciousness, focusing on cortical pyramidal neurons and their role in feedback signaling disruption during anesthesia, suggesting these 'psychic cells' may generate and control consciousness.
Technological advances in the past decades have begun to enable neuroscientists to address fundamental questions about consciousness in an unprecedented way. Here we review remarkable recent progress in our understanding of cellular-level mechanisms of conscious processing in the brain. Of particular interest are the cortical pyramidal neurons -- or "psychic cells" called by Ramón y Cajal more than 100 years ago -- which have an intriguing cellular mechanism that accounts for selective disruption of feedback signaling in the brain upon anesthetic-induced loss of consciousness. Importantly, a particular class of metabotropic receptors distributed over the dendrites of pyramidal cells are highlighted as the key cellular mechanism. After all, Cajal's instinct over a century ago may turn out to be correct -- we may have just begun to understand whether and how psychic cells indeed generate and control our consciousness.