valence hacking

Here’s a view that might be controversial in some corners of neuroscience, but it’s one I firmly believe: there is no brain region more central to the stream of your consciousness and your valence than the striatum. Consciousness is not generated by the striatum, but everything that matters about your consciousness seems to depend on it, it is what breathes fire into it, it’s something you really don’t want to lose. If we were to swap our primary sensory cortices, I’d argue we would likely remain roughly the same people, perhaps with some differences in how our sensory fields appear. But if we were to swap our striatum, we would become entirely different individuals, you would lose your values, your familiar stream of thoughts, your pain threshold would change, your attention would work differently, it would even drastically affect your dreams. This view is not too popular, especially in the field of consciousness science, where the striatum (or the basal ganglia in general) have often been dismissed as one of the most boring and insignificant parts of the brain, dealing mainly with motor commands (post-NCC), a passive relayer of something already decided by the cortex above. So here are reasons why the functions of the striatum are much more interesting, why it’s been partially overlooked (why psychoanalysts might be slightly to blame), and what its intriguing relationship with the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) is.

I will release the rest of this post, when my basal ganglia review lands on BioArxiv, bear with me.