Three years ago, I looked at McFadden’s paper Integrating information in the brain’s EM field: the cemi field theory of consciousness. In that paper, McFadden drew a distinction between temporal/serial integration of information and the point in time integration that he believed the EM field of the brain enabled. The point in time integration he thought tied directly to the experience of consciousness.
Several things have bothered me about this theory. Finally, I have come to the conclusion that the theory as presented is wrong but still may be generally on the right track.
The first thing that always bothered me was how did the brain maintain a continuous EM field across all of its structural components. The EM field generated by neurons is far weaker than what could be generated by a AA battery. It would require almost every neuron in the brain associated with a single moment of consciousness to fire simultaneously across the expanse of the brain, possibly with additional unneeded neurons firing in the gaps, to generate a continuous EM field. But that would only apply to reasonably normal brains. What about the civil servant without a brain? The civil servant suffered from non-communicating hydrocephalus that likely developed over the course of many years. The brain material had become severely deformed and had been compressed into a thin sheet. If you click the link, you can see the photos. The civil servant for years acted and felt completely normal and only when the condition became extreme did problems begin to develop. It seems unlikely a brain squeezed to the sides with a large bubble of fluid in its middle would be able to generate an EM field across the expanse of fluid.
That might seem to be a good argument for the more accepted connectionist type of approach that has the brain simply shuttling information around its circuits, more or less serially, and that somehow consciousness arises from it.
There is another alternative. McFadden might be wrong and that integration across the brain is primarily achieved with the connectionist circuits. It doesn’t occur at a point in time but rather over time. Consciousness itself is fragmented and arises at different parts, even at varying time scales, where the EM field can locally reach a sufficient strength sustainable for a sufficient period of time.
Check out this recent paper about spirals and vortexes in the human brain. Here’s the abstract.
The large-scale activity of the human brain exhibits rich and complex patterns, but the spatiotemporal dynamics of these patterns and their functional roles in cognition remain unclear. Here by characterizing moment-by-moment fluctuations of human cortical functional magnetic resonance imaging signals, we show that spiral-like, rotational wave patterns (brain spirals) are widespread during both resting and cognitive task states. These brain spirals propagate across the cortex while rotating around their phase singularity centres, giving rise to spatiotemporal activity dynamics with non-stationary features. The properties of these brain spirals, such as their rotational directions and locations, are task relevant and can be used to classify different cognitive tasks. We also demonstrate that multiple, interacting brain spirals are involved in coordinating the correlated activations and de-activations of distributed functional regions; this mechanism enables flexible reconfiguration of task-driven activity flow between bottom-up and top-down directions during cognitive processing. Our findings suggest that brain spirals organize complex spatiotemporal dynamics of the human brain and have functional correlates to cognitive processing.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01626-5
These spirals may represent the feedback of the brain with itself through the local EM field that composes consciousness.
Broad Speculations 
Holy shit! Now, are the spirals real or artifacts of the measuring device? Being described as fluctuations of magres signals is less that confidence boosting.
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Magres?
Here’s the more layman friendly version:
https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-spiral-shaped-signals-detected-in-the-human-brain
I don’t think these are simple artifacts and this is not the first study to detect something similar.
This has been especially noticed in visual and auditory centers of the brain and also has been linked to memory in other studies.
I don’t this is exactly the same as attention. This study specifically notes they are found in resting brains and brains performing tasks which acquire attention.
Here’s another post I did with links to several other papers.
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Magres= magnetic resonance imaging?
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FYI:
Simply stated, feedback occurs whenever the sound entering a microphone is reproduced by a loudspeaker, picked up by the microphone, and re-amplified again and again. The familiar howl of feedback is an oscillation that is triggered by sound entering the microphone.
https://www.shure.com/en-US/performance-production/louder/feedback-fact-and-fiction
That is talking about sound system but the same principle could work with EM fields and neurons. The neurons fire and get amplified by their own and nearby EM fields of other neurons which causes them to fire again. In this scenario, there is no problem with propagation across the brain because the feedback is occurring locally with the neurons amplifying themselves.
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I must admit that even as an enthusiastic supporter of McFadden’s consciousness proposal, I’ve essentially just smiled and nodded regarding his statement that the EM field is “integrated in time rather than space”. What effectively is meant by that? So with this post referencing his 2020 paper, I figured that I better go through it again carefully to see if I can get his meaning in a way that’s simple enough for me to understand. Then from there I’d assess whether or not McFadden’s proposal has the problem that James is now proposing.
Fortunately I think I’ve been able to figure out what McFadden means about fields integrating information over space rather than time. For example right now you and various objects around you display gravitational field effects to each other, to the Earth, and so on. Here we have integrated information over space rather than time in the sense that it all happen in an instantaneous causal way. A computer could essentially provide the same integrated information, though because algorithms would need to make such calculations step by step, it wouldn’t be integrated instantaneously as displayed by the field itself.
McFadden then illustrates how the neuron produced EM field of a brain should not just function statically like a gravitational field, but rather that the field could function as a computer in itself, and in a different way than the computational brain which creates the field. Theoretically an EM field computer could integrate information instantaneously throughout its field, just as gravity integrates information instantaneously throughout its own field. This seems important for the bound information of consciousness, as in the case of the components of a conscious visual image. While the brain must process such information step by step over time, an EM field could theoretically bind it all together instantaneously in an integrated way. I have stronger reasons for thinking that his CEMI field theory is true, though I think I now understand and agree with this particular element of his theory.
On the question of how the brain might maintain a continuous EM field over all of its structural components, it’s not my understanding that McFadden’s theory posits a need for a field like that. In the noted paper he acknowledged that the EM energy of a single fired neuron might have a degree of causal effectiveness over 80 micrometers given inverse squared and cubed laws. Apparently this might encompass 200 surrounding neurons. So McFadden seems quite aware of energy limitations here. The firing synchrony that he considers required to for a conscious EM field, would of course be causal over greater distances.
I’d love to know how many neurons tend to fire simultaneously during normal firing synchrony, as well as the number of neurons that this has some potential to affect. Professionals must know. Theoretically consciousness would exist in terms of fields like this. So even a flattened brain might not be defeated, that is if the neurons in it are able to achieve the right sort of synchrony amplified EM field, or theoretically consciousness itself.
It seems to me that this brain spiral thing (which I guess involves neurons firing in similar locations, perhaps directionally), might be associated with synchronous firing. I haven’t read the paper yet though. I see on twitter (or do they now call it “X”?) that McFadden has a new interview out, as well as a not yet peer reviewed paper comparing the testability of CEMI versus IIT. So over the coming weekend these will be a priority for me.
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Thanks for commenting Eric.
One of his arguments at some point was that his theory resolved the binding problem – how all of the elements of consciousness get bound into a whole.
What I am arguing is the integration isn’t done by the EM field. Essentially there are pockets of consciousness all over the brain. The integration or binding may not actually exist. It could be an illusion produced by the fact that the brain synchronizes with the external world, hence stuff is happening more or less in as unified way because of this external influence. Or, the binding and integration is done by the underlying neural connections without EM field influence. It could also be some of both.
Regarding the spirals and vortexes, I think it possible these are feedback processes occurring that raises the strength of the local EM field. That results in one of these pockets. Raising this strength and number of firings would serve to generate a stronger message to other parts of the brain.
Many phenomena related to “cognition without consciousness” might be resolved with this explanation.
For example, I walk past a broom but I’m not consciously aware of it, but later when somebody asks where the broom is I can recall it. The visual processing of seeing the broom occurred and got incorporated into my memory through non-conscious processing but the event didn’t rise to the level to generate a feedback firing that would have made it conscious. Blind sight may be the result of damage in the visual cortex that disables the ability of the circuits to generate the feedback process that results in conscious visual perception but the underlying circuits continue to process sufficiently that the frontal cortex, for example, might detect that something was seen through its connections.
If the spirals and vortexes could be demonstrated an increased and more sustained EM field that other parts of the brain, this might be good evidence in fasvor.
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There is an interesting video as part of the supplemental material to the paper. You have to download it. Still haven’t found a non-paywalled version of paper.
https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41562-023-01626-5/MediaObjects/41562_2023_1626_MOESM3_ESM.avi
What’s interesting is how much the flows actually resemble fluid dynamics like in rivers, wind tunnels (topic of a previous post), and weather with the spirals resembling vortices. Vorticity the measure actually is frequently associated with meteorology. I’m still not sure what the phase part of video represents, but the in the second part the blue and red swirls which are all over the brain and moving represent the strength of clockwise and counter-clockwise around a center point. Also, if I understand the black lines correctly they seem to flow around the vortices which may be significant too.
I suspect, if EM field theories are right, the effect of a vortex would be to concentrate the EM field on a small section of neurons, maybe even a single neuron. The direction of the vortex may or may not be significant.
Some other papers I’ve looked at suggest ways these vortices arise from spontaneous brain activity.
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I still think that an EM field should theoretically be an effective vehicle from which to instantly bind various things that the brain is doing in separate places, into a single unified phenomenal experience. But our speculation doesn’t alter reality itself even slightly on the matter. The good thing however is that McFadden’s theory, unlike virtually all other proposals on the market today, is empirically testable. It’s hilarious to me how popular unfalsifiable theories tend to become, though unpopular his testable theory happens to be.
First let’s say that scientists induce EM fields around the parameters of synchronous neuron firing in a specific location of someone’s brain. Also let’s say that the person tells us that this alters their consciousness, and continually verified when the person is given no other signs of when an exogenous energy field is being induced. (Actually rereading his 2020 paper I just noticed a reference to something like this in a non-human animal with apparent behavioral effects. Obviously a human subject would be needed however to explicitly tell experimenters what was going on phenomenally for them.) If continually verified then McFadden’s theory would decimate the work of countless theorists today, ushering in an enormous paradigm shift.
It’s at this point that scientists would explore the particulars. They’d know exactly where their various transmitters were placed in someone’s brain, and exactly how far away their induced energies should be causally effective given the inverse squared and cubed laws restricting electric and magnetic energies. That’s where they could explore your “pockets of consciousness” addition to his theory. Personally I have much bigger fish to fry however.
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