Ouch!
You are getting into your bed when you stub the big toe of your right foot against the middle leg of
the bed base.
‘Ouch!’ you exclaim, or you shout
some expletive that would be
inappropriate to repeat in this essay. But
it hurts! You can feel the pain in your toe,
however the pain is not in your toe, so
where is it? Pain is a perception; that is,
it’s really all in your head. Whether we’re
talking about a burn from a flame, a
hammer blow, or the pain from that bed
leg you just stubbed your toe on, there’s
nothing inherently painful in any given
stimulus. Instead, it’s all about how your
brain reads, and reacts to, the information
it receives from a given stimulus.1
Nevertheless, you are conscious of the
pain and it seems to be in your toe, but is
The path that a “this feels bad” signal travels going from a stubbed
toe to the brain, where it is processed and made into the feeling of
pain. Source: http://neurowiki2014.wikidot.com/group:pain
the consciousness of the pain in your toe, in your toe? Or is the consciousness of the pain in your
toe in your brain, or is the consciousness of the pain in your toe in your mind? Hmmm  these are
loaded questions so we’ll take a step back and analyse what happens in your body from the moment
you stub your toe on the bed post.
The stubbing
When you stub your toe, on the leg of the bed base say, free nerve endings, called nociceptors,2 in
the skin of your toe, send signals through the peripheral nervous system (PNS) to the central
nervous system (CNS) via axons. So, your toe, like some other parts of your body, is designed to
sense pain.
There are generally three main stages in the perception of pain. The first stage is sensing what is
going to cause the pain, that is pain sensitivity. In the second stage the signals are transmitted from
the cause of the pain, via the peripheral nervous system (PNS), to the dorsal horn (DH), which is
located in the spinal cord.
Lastly, the third stage performs the transmission of the signals to the higher brain via the central
nervous system (CNS). Typically, there are two routes for signal transmissions to be conducted: the
ascending and descending pathways. The pathway that goes upward carrying sensory information
from the body via the spinal cord towards the brain is defined as the ascending pathway, whereas
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the nerves that goes downward from the brain to the reflex organs via the spinal cord is known as
the descending pathway.3
As far as you are concerned, the pain is in your toe, but your ‘Ouch!’ reaction is not in your toe,
so the message must have been transmitted from your toe to your brain and/or your mind to make
you conscious of the pain, but what is this consciousness?
Nociceptors/free nerve endings, and the fibres carrying the pain sensation from the nociceptors to the
spinal cord.
So, where are we now in following the pain?
Pain
Briefly, as we have seen, stubbing your big toe has stimulated many nociceptors in your toe, which
have stimulated electrical impulses in axons–nerve fibres–to neurons in your brain, but the question
remains; what is it that makes you conscious of the pain?
In this essay, we’ll follow the path of the pain and, hopefully, at the end of the essay you will
have a credible suggestion for the answer to the question, what is it that makes you conscious of the
pain.
There are two types of neuronal fibres that carry the pain signal through the PNS. The faster
fibres–myelinated A-fibres–elicit a sharp pain sensation and the slower fibres–unmyelinated Cfibres–elicit a more burning pain sensation.4
A closer look
Now, we are going to follow the path of the pain to your brain in much greater detail to try and see
how you become conscious of the pain.
As you can see in the diagram below, neurons are made up of a cell body, also called soma,
which contains the nucleus of the cell which controls the cell and keeps it alive, as well as
branching treelike fibres known as the dendrites, which receive information in the form of action
potentials from other cells via long, segmented fibres, known as axons. If a certain threshold
potential is reached the conical axon hillock generates an impulse which enters the axon to be
transferred to other cells via the dendrites to axon terminals which end in synapses.
2
Looking more closely at the
nerve fibres or axons which
conduct the pain signal as
action potentials, we see that
the Schwann cells constitute
the myelinated axon which
has nodes of Ranvier, to
allow diffusion of ions,
Conduction of the action potential between cells
In a myelinated axon, the myelin sheath forces the current to travel down
the nerve fibre through the unmyelinated nodes of Ranvier, which have a
high concentration of ion channels. Upon stimulation, these ion channels
propagate the action potential to the next node. In this way the action
potential jumps along the fibre as it is regenerated at each node, a process
called saltatory conduction. In an unmyelinated axon, the action potential is
slower because is propagated along the entire membrane without this help.
enabling them to conduct the
action potential much faster
than the unmyelinated axons
to the dendrites which then
connect the axon to multiple
cells.
In addition to carrying information away from the cell body toward other neurons, axons also
transmit to the muscles and glands,5 and the brain. As mentioned above, neurons communicate with
each other via electrical events called ‘action potentials’.
This is important to note: the signals are transmitted electrically as action potentials.
These electrical action
potentials travel along the
axons and dendrites to
synapses, which are
essentially chemical
neurotransmitters that in
turn trigger an electrical
signal to allow the
electrical action potential
to propagate through to the
next cell. 6
Some physics: all
electrical events produce
an electromagnetic field
(emf), and ‘… it has been
Electrochemical transmission of a nerve impulse at the synapse.
The synapse, also called a neuronal junction, is the site of the transmission of
electric nerve impulses between two nerve cells–neurons–or between a neuron
and a gland or muscle cell. A synaptic connection between a neuron and a
muscle cell is called a neuromuscular junction. The arrival of the nerve
impulse at the presynaptic terminal stimulates the release of neurotransmitter
into the synaptic gap. The binding of the neurotransmitter to receptors on the
postsynaptic membrane stimulates the regeneration of the action potential in
the postsynaptic neuron.
known for more than a
century that the brain generates its own electromagnetic (em) field, a fact that is widely utilised in
brain scanning techniques.’7
3
This is a clue to what consciousness is.
There are two main reasons that substantiate the idea that specific areas of the brain are related both
physically and electrically to specific body parts and, motor inputs and sensory inputs. These are
illustrated in the two diagrams below.
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patterns
If our brains are connected to a sensing device such as an electroencephalogram–EEG; functional
magnetic resonance imaging–fMRI; positron emission tomography–PET; precision ultrasound–
magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound surgery–MRgFUS, or event-related potentials–
ERPs, it becomes obvious that different parts of the body are permanently associated with the same
parts of the brain so it will have the same pattern of stimulus, that is, we can say that the emf
produced by a particular stimulus will always have the same pattern. In our example of the
stubbed toe, the emf pattern of which is stored in your memory, will stir that memory of previous
stubbings.
Similarly, every time you see the colour red, you will be conscious of it as the colour red
because of the electromagnetic pattern you have memorised for red. That is, from now on,
observing something that is red in colour will stimulate the particular emf pattern that you are
conscious of as being red.
[The subject of memory, is important to consciousness, but there it is not so well understood as it
seemed to be until fairly recently, so we’ll take a brief look at both the main current theories and their
failings and leave it to the experts to do further work … later.]
Since you will be receiving a large number of stimuli at any given moment—sights, smells, sounds,
tastes, thoughts, maybe pain—they will produce a large number of patterns which will accumulate
and combine to form a constantly changing complex electromagnetic field. It is proposed that it is
this constantly changing complex electromagnetic field that we perceive as being consciousness,
but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.8
But how was this electrical stimulation achieved? This question was left unanswered until recent
work by Thibaud Parpaite and Bertrand Coste on ‘Piezo channels’, revealed that the neurons are
stimulated by the actions of piezo9 proteins.
Piezo proteins constitute a family of excitatory ion channels directly gated by mechanical forces. These
ion channels are involved in cell mechanotransduction—the conversion of mechanical forces into
biological signals.
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Mechanotransduction is important because all living organisms are subjected to mechanical forces
from their environment and rely on mechanotransduction for their survival. For instance, our senses of
touch, mechanical pain, proprioception,10 hearing and balance depend on mechanically-activated
channels.11
Piezo-dependent mechanotransduction.
Various mechanical stimuli exerted on cells induce changes in the membrane tension,
resulting in the piezo channel opening.
In the cemi field theory,12 a conscious being is aware of the information contained within the cemi
field, that is, qualia—the subjective feel of particular mind states13—must correspond to particular
configurations of the cemi field. The qualia for the colour red will thereby correspond to the em field
perturbations that are generated whenever our neurones are responding to red light in our visual field.14
Relevant work in 2019 is reported under the heading, ‘What happens in our brain when we do
complex tasks?’;
Have you ever sat down to complete your morning crossword or Sudoku and wondered about what’s
happening in your brain? Somewhere in the activity of the billions of neurons in your brain lies the code
that lets you remember a key word, or apply the logic required to complete the puzzle. Given the brain’s
intricacy, you might assume that these patterns are incredibly complex and unique to each task. But
recent research suggests things are actually more straightforward than that. It turns out that many
structures in your brain work together in precise ways to coordinate their activity, shaping their actions
to the requirements of whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve.15
What we are interested here is the mention of patterns, which indicates that the same parts of the
brain always perform the same tasks and would, therefore, produce the same electromagnetic fields.
However, since at the level of the brain’s em field, sensory information may be combined with neuronal
information acquired through learning, the ensuing field modulations would be expected to correlate not
with the sensory stimuli alone, but with the meaning of particular stimuli. ????
Herex
First time stubbing, no pain sensed at first, what?
no memory, where is memory?
Follow the pain from the stubbing to the brain, feeling
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Back emf role??
The role of consciousness in memory16
It is well established that conscious awareness or attention appears to a prerequisite to laying down
long-term memories and for learning complex tasks (although unconscious or subliminal learning may
be possible for some tasks), but the mechanism remains obscure.
However, in the cemi field theory, memory and learning are inevitable consequences of conscious
attention. As described above, the influence of the cemi field in the brain (consciousness) may provide a
fine control over motor tasks — a small push or pull on the probability of neurone firing. However, if
the target neurones for em augmentation are connected by Hebbian synapses,17 then the influence of the
brain’s em field will tend to become hard-wired into either increased (long-term potentiation, LTP) or
decreased (long-term depression, LTD) neural connectivity. After repeated augmentation by the brain’s
em field, conscious motor actions will become increasingly independent of em field influences. The
motor activity will be ‘learned’ and may thereafter be performed unconsciously, without the em
influence on the neural networks involved. Similarly, in the absence of any motor output, the cemi field
may be involved in strengthening synapses to ‘hard-wire’ neurones and thereby lay down long-term
memories.
Before we go on, it’s important to clear up the controversial aspects of what consciousness is. Since
it will come up early in any discussion about consciousness, we’ll start with the “hard problem”,
first conjectured in 1995 by David Chalmers:
It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of
why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems
objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.18
This confusion leads to a definition of consciousness which is controversial, as is delineated in this
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry.19
herex
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Brian Gardiner, ‘Why Does Stubbing Your Toe Hurt So Damn Much?’, Wired Science, 7 April, 2015:
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/stubbing-toe-hurt-damn-much/
Nachum Dafny, ‘Pain Principles’, Neuroscience Online, the Open-Access Neuroscience Electronic Textbook:
https://nba.uth.tmc.edu/neuroscience/m/s2/chapter06.html
Yam Mun Fei, et al., ‘General Pathways of Pain Sensation and the Major Neurotransmitters Involved in Pain Regulation’,
International Journal of Molecular Sciences: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/19/8/2164/htm
Tatiana F Almeida, Suely Roizenblatt, and Sergio Tufik, ‘Afferent pain pathways: a neuroanatomical review’, Brain Research,
1000.1, 2004, 40–56.
Charles Stangor and Jennifer Walinga, ‘Chapter 4. Brains, Bodies, and Behaviour, 4.1 The Neuron Is the Building Block of the
Nervous System’, Introduction to Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition: https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/31-the-neuron-is-the-building-block-of-the-nervous-system/
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Neuronal junction, Synaptic junction’, Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/science/neuroplasticity
Johnjoe McFadden, ‘Synchronous Firing and Its Influence on the Brain’s Electromagnetic Field: Evidence for an
Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, No. 4, 2002, p 24.
For more detailed explanation of the ‘Electromagnetic Theory of Consciousness’, see Johnjoe McFadden, YouTube, especially
around 30 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRaRYX3bBRE
Older readers may be familiar with the crystal pick-up on a gramophone which relies on the distortion of the crystal by the
ripples in the grooves on the record to produce, by the piezo effect, an electric potential which is converted into music by the
gramophone circuitry.
proprioception is the perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body.
Thibaud Parpaite and Bertrand Coste, ‘Piezo channels’, Current Biology 27, 3 April 3, 2017 © 2017 Elsevier Ltd, R243–R258:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.01.048
conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory
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Michael Tye, ‘Qualia’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.):
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/qualia.
Johnjoe McFadden, ‘Synchronous Firing and Its Influence on the Brain’s Electromagnetic Field: Evidence for an
Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, No. 4, 2002, p 43.
Shine, J. M., Breakspear, M., Bell, P.T. et al. ‘Human cognition involves the dynamic integration of neural activity and
neuromodulatory systems’, Nature Neuroscience 22, 289–296 (2019): https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-018-0312-0
Johnjoe McFadden, p 41.
D O Hebb, The Organization of Behavior, New York: Wiley & Sons, 1949.
David J Chalmers, ‘Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3):200–19, 1995.
Van Gulick, Robert, ‘Consciousness’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.):
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/consciousness/
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