Question: How does the brain generate consciousness ?

Kevin Healy answered on 15 Nov 2014:

Thats probably one of the biggest questions facing science at the moment becaues the short answer is that we dont know. There is a few things that we do know though.
We know certain areas in the brain are responsble for certain things relating to being consciousness (bassically the parts being knocked out during an anesthetic) with the frontal lobes being particularly important. So it most be something that these parts are doing.
We also know that it must be something got to do with how the neurons in these parts comunicate together. The problem is then how do neurons firing create self awarness? Whatever it is, it is at least partly got to do with the brain being more then a sum of its part type system. This is like the way that even though we understand how atoms bounce of each other we cant use that to predict that lots of atoms bouncing off each other creates things like the weather. In a similar way even though we might understand how neurons work that might not help us in understanding what happens when lots of them communicate. To figure out how if how the whole system works might be the answer scientists are building large computers to try and replicate the brain with the hope that they see some types of self awarness.

Other ideas are that their are some laws of phyisics we havent found that will explain consciousness as one scientists Rodger Penrose believes (He worked with Stephen Hawking so he’s a smart guy!). Either way it might be a while before we really understand whats going on in our own heads!