Ambron’s Local Field Potentials and Electromagnetic Waves

Biologist and pain researcher Richard Ambron suggests that understanding the specific consciousness of pain might help to understand the mechanism of consciousness in general. Pain is ideal for studying consciousness, he says, because it receives priority over all other sensations, reflecting its criticality for survival (Ambron, 2023a, 2023b; Ambron & Sinav, 2022).

Pain Pathways and Long-Term Potentiation

Pain starts at the site of injury where damaged cells release small molecular compounds that bind to the terminals of peripheral neurons and trigger action potentials which encode information about the injury. The greater the severity of the injury, the greater the number and frequency of action potentials, and the greater the intensity of pain.

The pain pathway is well documented: from periphery to spinal cord to the thalamus, where we first become aware of the injury but do not feel the effect of onerous pain. Rather, the region for feeling the hurtfulness of pain is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), where input from the thalamus activates a complex neuronal circuit. Essential are the pyramidal neurons, which have a triangular cell body and a long dendrite with many branches that are vital for experiencing pain.

Because information transmitted between neurons must traverse the minuscule space between them—the synapse—axons from thalamic neurons transmit to dendrites of ACC neurons by releasing a neurotransmitter that traverses the gap, binds to the dendritic endings and triggers action potentials.

When there is prolonged activity at the synapse in response to a serious injury, the synapses become “hyperresponsive” and strengthened. This strengthening, called long-term potentiation (LTP), sensitizes the synapse so that it takes fewer action potentials to cause pain. This is why even a gentle touch to the site of an injury will hurt (Ambron, 2023a, 2023b; Ambron & Sinav, 2022).

Modulation by Other Brain Regions

In addition to housing circuits for pain, the ACC receives information from other brain regions. For example, inputs from the amygdala can increase the intensity of the pain due to anxiety or fear, whereas those from the nucleus accumbens can reduce the pain if the reward for bearing the pain is considered worthwhile. Thus, what we experience as pain depends on interactions among several areas of the brain.

Local Field Potentials and Electromagnetic Waves

To maintain electro-neutrality after an injury, there is an efflux of positive ions from the cell body that forms a local field potential (LFP) and creates electromagnetic (EM) waves in the extracellular space around the pyramidal neurons.

In Ambron's novel move, he posits that these EM waves now contain the information about the pain that was previously encoded in the action potentials. In other words, the pain information was transferred from action potentials to LFPs to EM waves, which could influence nearby circuits, such as those for attention.

Ambron speculates that these EM waves contribute to consciousness. Assuming information from other senses is also transformed into EM waves, it also might help solve the “binding/combination problem,” because integrating information from all the waves could explain how individual sensory inputs combine to create “a unified, coherent version of the world.” Unlike most theories of consciousness, Ambron believes his hypothesis can be tested (Ambron, 2023a, 2023b).