Transcription
What's the mystery that you would love to uncover in the near term, beyond beyond all the mysteries you're already surrounded by?
This is a structure. It's underneath our cortex. It's yay big. You have one on the left, on the right, underneath this, underneath the insula. It's very thin. It's like 1 mm. It's embedded in in wiring, in white matter. So, it's very difficult to image. Uh, it has connection to every cortical region. That the function of this structure is similar to the role of a conductor in a symphony orchestra. You have all the different cortical players. You have some that do motion, some that do theory of mind, some that infer social interaction and color and hearing and all the different modules in cortex. And this is really the function because it has relatively few neurons compared to cortex, but it, it, it talks, it sort of receives input from all of them and it projects back to all of them.
There's a part of your brain that doesn't care about logic, language, or memory. It stays quiet when you solve a math problem or recall your first kiss. But when something deep hits, like a dream or a death or a movement that shakes your soul, it lights up. A thin hidden layer buried between the cortex and the basil ganglia. Hidden so well that most people don't even know it exists. Some scientists call it the seed of consciousness. Others call it the most mysterious structure in the brain. We've mapped almost every major brain region. We know what they do. But this one, no one really knows why it's there or what happens when it wakes up.
Story of Santa Claus, why he comes down the chimney is because this, this juice or this, what, whatever substance actually passes what's called the clustrm, which is where they got Santa Claus. So, it goes down the chimney and back.
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All right, with Surf Shark running in the background and protecting your online mind, let's rewind back to know more. Long before the scans, long before the theories, before anyone even knew this part of the brain existed, one man was already chasing its shadow. Francis Crick is the reason you've heard of DNA. In 1953, he and James Watson discovered DNA's double helix structure, the blueprint of life. That alone could have been his legacy. But after solving one of the biggest mysteries in science, Crick turned to something even more bizarre.
Yes, exactly. That tiny hidden part of the brain that we today call the cola. When you look how far you've got to go to explain this very complicated thing and all the processes which are very transient and interacting in in very intricate ways. Uh, we're clearly only just beginning. Yes. But nevertheless, we have made a solid beginning but only a beginning. Crick believed it could be the part that held everything together. Your thoughts, your senses, your awareness, they all pass through different regions. But somehow you feel whole. You feel like you. And he thought the claustrom was the reason why. In 2005, just before his death, he co-wrote a paper in philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B calling it the conductor of consciousness. That's what he called it, the conductor. The one piece pulling the entire orchestra of your mind into harmony. He wasn't guessing. He'd spent years studying it, mapping its connections, tracing the highways it used to talk to the rest of the brain. He believed it could be the master switch. But right when the pieces were starting to come together, Crick was gone.
So I think the kind of consciousness that Francis Crick was talking about is that we have a function in our brain that is a storyteller. And so it imagines things like motives and causes and effects and and so it imposes that order in order to predict other people. And so we have that mechanism and we apply that mechanism to ourselves. So we notice ourselves reaching for food. And so we say to ourselves, "Oh, we must be hungry." But we're observing ourselves just like we observe other people. And we're telling a story about ourselves just like we're telling a story about other people.
Then almost a decade later, something happened in an operating room that made scientists stop and wonder. Had Crick been right all along? It was supposed to be a routine brain mapping procedure. In 2014, a woman undergoing surgery for epilepsy had electrodes placed on her brain so doctors could figure out where her seizures were coming from. They carefully stimulated different regions, one at a time, to see how her body and behavior would respond. Everything was normal until they reached one small forgotten strip buried deep inside her brain. What happened next wasn't a seizure or a blackout. It was something much stranger. The moment they activated that region, she froze. Her body stayed upright. Her eyes were open. She was breathing, but she couldn't speak, couldn't blink, couldn't respond. It was like someone flipped a switch and turned off her mind. The surgeons kept calling her name, but no reaction. Then they turned the stimulation off and she came back instantly, confused, calm, like she'd just been asleep. But she hadn't. She had no memory of what happened, no awareness that anything was even wrong. The only part of her brain that had been touched was the colostrum. Dr. Muhammad Kubesy, the neurologist who led the surgery at George Washington University, knew they had stumbled onto something rare. She wasn't unconscious in the medical sense. She wasn't asleep. It was like her awareness had vanished, but the machine kept running. Kubesy and his team documented the event carefully and later published their findings in the journal Epilepsy and Behavior in 2014. The case sent a ripple through the neuroscience world. No other brain region had ever triggered such a complete shutdown of consciousness while leaving the rest of the brain seemingly untouched. Since then, some researchers have quietly started calling the colostrum the consciousness switch.
Well, so there's a structure called the cluster. Okay, that the function of this structure is similar, it's just a metaphor to the role of a conductor in a symphony orchestra. You have all the different cortical players. You have some that do motion, some that do theory of mind, some that infer social interaction and color and hearing and all the different modules in cortex. But of course, what consciousness is, consciousness puts it all together into one package, right? The binding problem, all of that. And this is really the function because it has relatively few neurons compared to cortex, but it, it, it talks, it sort of receives input from all of them and it projects back to all of them.
Shutting down consciousness is one thing. But imagine if your brain could make choices, real decisions without your knowledge while you're fully awake and conscious. Every day you wake up and make decisions, or at least you think you do. You decide what to eat, where to go, what to say. But neuroscience tells a different story, a much stranger one. Where you aren't really deciding at all. In the 1980s, neurologist Benjamin Leette ran a bizarre experiment. He asked people to move their fingers and tell them exactly when they felt the urge to do it. What he found was shocking. Brain activity began before people became aware of choosing. Conscious thought came after the brain had already started the motion. And it didn't stop there. In 2008, a team led by Chunangoon pushed things even further. They used fMRI scans to monitor decisions in real time. The test was simple. Press a button with your left or right hand. The catch? The researchers could predict the choice 7 seconds before the subject made it. Published in Nature Neuroscience, the study confirms something unsettling. Your brain might be making choices while your conscious mind watches from the sidelines. So, if you're not making your own decisions, who or what is?
Some link it all to the cola. It could be the one editing your life into a clean timeline. Or maybe it's not helping at all. Maybe it's just recording. Or maybe it's waiting. And when something cracks the surface, grief, prayer, fear, death, that's when it finally wakes up. And so we're testing that right now. We've got these beautiful neuron reconstructions in the mouse called crown of th, um, crown of th neurons that are in the cluster that have the most widespread connection of any nerve neuron I've ever seen. They're very, they, you have individual neurons that sit in the clouds from tiny, but then they have this, single neurons have this huge axonal tree that cover both Ipsy and contraateral cortex and and trying to turn using, you know, fancy tools like optogenetics, trying to turn those neurons on or off and study it, what, what happens in the, in the mouse. So this thing is perhaps where the parts become the whole, it inter, perhaps it's one of the structures, it's a very good way of putting it, where the individual parts turn into the whole, of the whole, of the conscious experience.
People have described it for centuries, something strange that happens when you're on the edge of life or deep in moments of silence and surrender. A kind of switch flips inside you. Some say it happened during prayer. Others say it came during near-death experiences or after taking a powerful psychedelic like DMT, the so-called spirit molecule. They describe vivid visions, a loss of self, and something that feels more real than reality itself. But what's going on inside the brain when that happens? In 2020, researchers published a study in Frontiers in Psychology that tried to answer that exact question. They looked at people reporting intense spiritual experiences, things that couldn't be explained by logic or emotion alone. When the brain scans were analyzed, one strange pattern kept showing up. A cluster of activity around a region scientists still don't fully understand. Not the frontal lobe, not the memory centers, just a shadowy structure buried deep in the brain responding to things beyond logic. States of awe, surrender, unity. The kinds of moments where people say they left their body or met something greater than themselves. And the two threads within lived human spirituality where I focus in the awakened brain are the two areas where the line share of science says our lives are entirely different. These two threads of live spirituality are entirely game-changing when it comes to our possibility and our realization. And they are one, the seat of transcendent awareness, which is to say our innate hardwired capacity to see into the deeper nature of life where we see that we are loved, held, guided, and never alone. There's a capacity hardwired in us to see a transcendent relationship.
So what is it really? Could the colostrum be more than just a strange brain part? Could it be a kind of spiritual antenna? A hidden receiver tuned to something we were never meant to measure. In ancient belief systems, there's something called the third eye. It's not a metaphor. It's described as a real center of awareness. Right between your eyebrows, just behind the forehead. In yogic tradition, it's called the ana chakra. In mystic text, it's the eye that doesn't see the world. It sees the truth. And surprisingly, claustrom is hidden right beneath that same region, buried deep, but linked to almost every major part of your brain. Some researchers now wonder, could this be the physical version of that inner eye?
Not only this, in Gnostic writings, there's a belief that every person carries a divine spark, a piece of God that doesn't belong to this world. It doesn't think, it remembers. It's what's left when everything else is stripped away. Strangely, the claustrum might be the closest thing to that idea inside the brain. It doesn't just process one sense or function. It connects them all. Thought, sight, sound, emotion. It ties your experience into one moment, oneself. Maybe ancient mystics and modern neuroscience have been circling the same mystery all along, just in different languages.
Even some mystics say there's a veil between this world and the next. People who've had near-death experiences or taking something like DMT often say it lifts. For a moment, they're outside themselves watching everything from the other side. And the colostrum might be the only part of the brain that responds in those moments. Not during sleep, not during thought, but when the mind starts to let go of the body. Some researchers now believe this region could be tied to that veil, maybe even holding it in place. And when it shifts, that's when people say they see through it.
So knowing that through the lens of epidemiology there was something heritable built into us, a form of spiritual awareness that had such a huge impact on our health and wellness. It seemed that we could try to operationalize that dimension as a task in the MRI scanner and live action watch people engaged in a deep transcendent relationship. But I want you to think about something for a second. What exactly flips the switch? What wakes it up? It's not thought. It's not will. It's raw input. Music, fear, grief, beauty. The kinds of things that skip the brain and hit the soul. That's what the claustrom answers to.
In 2019, a study published in Neuroimage tracked brain activity during intense emotional reactions. The subjects weren't solving problems or speaking. They were just listening to music. Deep moving emotional music. And when the feelings peaked, a strange thing happened. The cola lit up, not just once, repeatedly. It didn't activate for math, language, or memory, but it responded to pure, unfiltered emotion, like it had been waiting for something real to pass through.
Some go further. There's a theory that certain sound frequencies like 432 hertz can affect consciousness. People call it the natural tuning of the universe. Mainstream science hasn't proven it, but the claims keep coming. People say they could feel it in their bones, like the sound moves straight through them, bypassing the brain entirely. And if the claustrum is involved in how we process those invisible shifts in energy, it can mean it's reacting to something older than language, something encoded in us. Music is not just a powerful way to activate the emotion systems. It activates memory, motor control, imagery, attention, sequencing, spatial processing, and abstract thinking. It's one of the most powerful ways we have of activating most of the brain.
There's a reason people are nervous about brain tech because once you can read the brain, it's only a matter of time before someone tries to rewrite it. And Claustrom could be that one area that has scientists, tech giants, and governments quietly paying attention. If this really is the part that governs awareness, the last safe place in your mind, what happens if it's hacked? Elon Musk's Neuralink is already testing chips that read and send brain signals. Meanwhile, the US military has been running trials with EEG headsets, trying to understand how soldiers think and react under pressure. But the scariest thing, they're not just tracking brain waves anymore. They could be modulating them. In 2021, a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering showed that non-invasive brain stimulation could already change how people focus, remember, and feel. These aren't science fiction experiments. They're happening now. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA has publicly funded projects to develop brain computer interfaces that could influence decision-making, mood, even long-term memory.
Well, the problem is simply how do you see things and why, why is it your conscious? It's very difficult to say what you mean by conscious, but you can give examples where people can do things where they're not conscious. A little bit can sometimes leak through from, on some, some circumstances, from the visual input to the motor output. Or you can take states where you're not cons, normally thought to be conscious, like under a deep anesthetic. People seem to forget that many of the early experiments on, on animals in which their, their visual system was explored by putting electrodes in their brains were done on anized animals who strictly speaking weren't seeing anything. And the question is therefore, what is the difference in what's going on in your brain, and particular in the visual system, which was what I was interested in, when you report that you're seeing something and when you can't report for some reason or another, you don't report you're not seeing something, and yet things are still going on in your brain.
So here's the question. If the classroom is the control center for the consciousness, what happens if it's turned off or redirected or manipulated without your permission? And maybe that's why it matters so much. Because the one region no one fully understands could be the easiest to exploit.
For over a decade, scientists have been racing to map the human brain like a digital blueprint. Projects like the human conneto project and the Allen brain atlas have charted hundreds of brain regions in incredible detail, naming their functions, tracking their networks, tracing the electrical signals that make us who we are. But even now, after scanning thousands of minds, one area remains mostly uncharted. The cola. In 2023, neuroscientist Dr. Michael Zecki published a paper in current biology asking a chilling question. Could artificial intelligence ever achieve true awareness without understanding the claustrum? His answer was unclear because even now with all our tech and brain scans, we don't know what the structure actually does. We only know what happens when it goes quiet. Awareness fades. Identity disappears. The self blinks out. So maybe it's not just another brain part. Maybe it's the one piece holding the entire mystery together, the thread between biology and being. And if we don't understand it, maybe we don't understand ourselves at all.
So what are your thoughts on that? Let us know in the comments below. Before you go, don't forget to check out the Surf Shark offer. It is still waiting for you in the description below.