The Production of Consciousness Out of States of Consciousness

Abstract

Abstract It has been found that there are five million magnetite crystals per gram in the human brain. Interestingly, the meninges, has twenty times that number. These ‘biomagnetite’ crystals demonstrate two interesting features. The first is that their shapes do not occur in nature, suggesting that they were formed in the tissue, rather than being absorbed from outside. The other is that these crystals appear to be oriented so as to maximize their magnetic moment, which tends to give groups of these crystals the capacity to act as a system. We hypothesize that the entire set of modalities, cognitive and sensory, may be heuristically compared to a sound mixing board. In this metaphor, all the various modalities are represented as vertical rheostats with enhanced functioning increasing towards the top, and suppressed function increasing towards the bottom. Further, the act of becoming conscious of phenomena in any given modality involves the adjustment of that modality’s ‘rheostat’.