And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7
Some Mysteries of God just may not be able to be unlocked....
"The first hypothesis came in the mid-17th century from René 
Descartes,
who notoriously claimed that the “soul has its principle seat in the
small gland located in the middle of the brain”—namely, the pineal
gland. The problem Descartes was trying to solve was how the soul (or
mind), which he viewed as entirely separate from the body, nonetheless
interacts with it. Descartes borrowed the concept of “animal spirits” from the ancient
Greek physician Galen. Animal spirits, Descartes believed, were
psycho-physiological messengers in the blood that can record physical
sensations while providing signals that the mind interprets as conscious
perceptions. He nominated the pineal gland as the hub for these
half-mental, half-material messenger spirits to interface and radiate
throughout the body.
In 1835, German physiologist Johannes Müller nominated as the seat of
consciousness the medulla oblongata—a part of the brainstem that
regulates the flow of oxygen rich blood cells to the rest of the brain.
Although it’s a kind of power source for the brain, the medulla
oblongata doesn’t seem related to higher-order conscious functions from a
modern perspective. (It’s now known that the medulla is responsible for
involuntary functions like vomiting and sneezing, hardly defining
aspects of the human experience.)
English physiologist William B. Carpenter located consciousness in
the thalamus, in the middle of the brain. Even today, the role of the
thalamus in consciousness remains largely conjectural.
Francis Crick had an uncanny ability to envision the
function of a biological system by looking at its structure. Crick
searched for a neural structure capable of integrating information from
distant regions of the cortex. Decades of fine-grained neuroanatomical
studies directed him to one area of the brain that satisfied all his
criteria: the claustrum. Bi-directionally connected with arguably every
area of the cortex, the claustrum appears like the Grand Central Station
of the brain. Crick’s analogy was that if the different areas of the
cortex processing various sensory modalities (visual, auditory,
somatosensory, and so on) were the musicians in an orchestra, the
claustrum was the conductor making sure everyone hit the right notes in
time. His argument was simple, elegant, and cogent. It also provided the
first scientifically sound and testable hypothesis for the seat of
consciousness.
A 2014 case study of an epileptic patient at George Washington
University showed that electrical stimulation near the claustrum
resulted in an immediate loss of consciousness, although the patient
regained consciousness as soon as the stimulation stopped.
And in 2017, researchers at the Allen Institute discovered that the
claustrum contains neurons that reach across the entirety of the brain
like a “crown of thorns,” supporting the hypothesis that it’s a massive
integrator and conductor of brain-wide activity. For a moment, it seemed that the claustrum was indeed what Crick suspected: the hub of consciousness.
However, two studies published in 2019 suggest that the claustrum’s 
moment has passed. A study on five epileptic patients at Stanford
University demonstrated that zapping the claustrum on both sides of the
brain had no effect on their subjective experience.
Corroborating this, a study on mice from investigators at the
University of Maryland showed that deactivating the claustrum resulted
in no apparent loss of consciousness. Based on these data, it seems that the claustrum may be yet another red herring in the hunt for the seat of consciousness.
Bernard Baars argues that
consciousness does not arise from a single anatomical hub like a
claustrum. Instead, it emerges from a complex network of functional hubs
working together in a sort of neuronal “cloud computing” format."
PocketWorthy
