Does Consciousness Begin Deeper in the Brain Than We Thought?
A provocative 2026 neuroscience theory challenges the traditional emphasis on the cerebral cortex and raises new questions about the brainstem, pain, anesthesia, and subjective awareness
Biotech International Institute (BII)
Beyond the Discovery: Five Neuroscience Questions That Could Shape Tomorrow's Medicine
Thursday, November 12, 2026
Introduction: Where Does the Feeling of Being You Come From?
Right now, you are experiencing the world.
You can see words on a screen.
You may hear sounds around you.
You can recognize your surroundings.
You can remember previous experiences and anticipate what might happen next.
But beneath those abilities lies a far more fundamental phenomenon.
You are aware that you are experiencing something.
That simple fact presents one of the greatest unanswered questions in neuroscience.
How does biological activity inside the nervous system produce subjective experience?
How do electrical impulses, neurotransmitters, and interconnected neurons give rise to the sensation of being conscious?
For decades, much of consciousness research has concentrated on the cerebral cortex—the large, intricately folded outer portion of the brain.
Scientists have investigated cortical networks involved in perception, attention, memory, and the integration of information.
However, a provocative scientific paper published August 25, 2026, in The Neuroscientist proposes a different starting point.
The article, Brainstem Theory of Consciousness, was written by Marshall Devor and Mark Baron.
The authors argue that the most fundamental form of subjective awareness may arise from circuitry within the brainstem, rather than being generated primarily by the cortex.
Their hypothesis challenges an influential assumption in neuroscience.
Perhaps the cortex supplies much of the detailed information we experience, while deeper brain structures contribute something essential to the experience itself.
The proposal is controversial.
It has not established where consciousness originates.
But it raises important, testable questions about how different brain structures contribute to human awareness.
For Biotech International Institute, the broader scientific lesson is particularly relevant.
Understanding neurological function requires investigating not only which brain regions become active, but also what those regions actually contribute to the biological process under study.
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1. What Exactly Is Consciousness?
Before investigating where consciousness originates, scientists must define what they are trying to explain.
That is not straightforward.
Researchers distinguish among several related concepts.
Wakefulness describes a physiological state involving arousal and the capacity to respond to the environment.
Awareness refers to having conscious experiences, such as seeing, hearing, or feeling something.
Access consciousness concerns information that becomes available for reporting, reasoning, or guiding behavior.
Phenomenal consciousness refers to the subjective quality of experience—what it feels like to see a color, experience discomfort, or simply be aware.
These concepts overlap, but they are not identical.
A person can be awake without demonstrating normal awareness.
Someone can also experience vivid dreams while asleep.
And an individual may be conscious despite being unable to communicate through ordinary movement.
This complexity makes consciousness difficult to measure.
Researchers cannot directly observe another individual's subjective experience.
They must investigate neural activity, behavior, physiological responses, and other indicators.
2. Why Has the Cerebral Cortex Received So Much Attention?
The cerebral cortex participates in many functions associated with conscious experience.
It processes visual and auditory information.
It supports language, memory, planning, and complex decision-making.
Different cortical regions contribute to different aspects of perception.
Visual cortical networks help process information about shapes, movement, and color.
Auditory networks contribute to the analysis of sound.
Other networks participate in attention, bodily sensation, and the integration of information.
Damage to particular cortical regions can profoundly alter what a person perceives.
These observations have made the cortex central to theories of consciousness.
But an important distinction remains.
A structure involved in processing the contents of awareness is not necessarily the only structure involved in making awareness possible.
That distinction lies at the center of the new brainstem hypothesis.
3. Meet the Brainstem: A Small Structure With Essential Functions
The brainstem connects the brain with the spinal cord.
It includes the midbrain, pons, and medulla oblongata.
Although relatively small compared with the cerebral hemispheres, the brainstem contains numerous specialized neural circuits.
These participate in essential processes such as:
- Respiratory regulation
- Cardiovascular control
- Sleep and wakefulness
- Arousal
- Sensory and motor signaling
- Protective reflexes
- Neuromodulatory activity
The brainstem also contains structures involved in regulating activity throughout the rest of the brain.
Some brainstem neurons send projections to widespread cortical and subcortical regions.
Through these connections, brainstem systems influence whether the nervous system is asleep, awake, attentive, or unresponsive.
This role is well established.
The debate concerns whether brainstem circuitry does more than regulate the conditions necessary for consciousness.
4. The 2026 Proposal: Could the Brainstem Generate Basic Subjective Awareness?
Devor and Baron propose that raw subjective consciousness arises from biological computations in a region of the brainstem.
Their theory emphasizes circuitry associated with the dorsal mesopontine tegmentum.
This region spans portions of the midbrain and pons.
The authors distinguish the basic experience of being conscious from the detailed information represented elsewhere in the brain.
In their proposed framework, the brainstem provides the fundamental subjective aspect of awareness.
The cortex performs much of the sophisticated processing needed to interpret the external world.
Interactions between these systems then allow selected information to become consciously experienced.
This is a conceptual model of how consciousness might be organized.
The authors do not claim to have experimentally identified the precise cellular process that transforms neural activity into subjective experience.
Indeed, specifying that process remains a central unresolved challenge.
5. Why Pain Is Central to the Theory
One of the most interesting parts of the paper concerns pain.
Pain is an experience with an unmistakable subjective quality.
It is not merely the electrical detection of a potentially harmful stimulus.
The nervous system can detect damaging stimuli through nociception.
But nociception and consciously experienced pain are not equivalent.
A protective withdrawal reflex can occur without requiring conscious deliberation.
The authors argue that evidence from neurological injury, stimulation, and pain-related signaling supports an important role for subcortical structures in the subjective experience of pain.
They propose that brainstem circuits may transform information about harmful stimuli into an experience that feels unpleasant.
From this, they develop a broader hypothesis.
If certain subcortical circuits can support the subjective component of pain, might similar biological machinery contribute to other forms of conscious experience?
That inference is central to their theory.
However, it is not a settled conclusion.
Pain perception is complex, and extensive evidence implicates cortical, thalamic, brainstem, spinal, and peripheral processes.
Scientists must therefore distinguish between demonstrating that a pathway contributes to pain and demonstrating that it independently generates subjective awareness.
6. What Brain Stimulation Can—and Cannot—Tell Us
Researchers have learned a great deal about brain function through electrical stimulation.
Stimulating certain cortical regions can produce recognizable sensory experiences.
For example, stimulation of visual regions may produce perceived flashes or patterns.
Stimulation of somatosensory regions can produce sensations associated with particular parts of the body.
Devor and Baron highlight evidence suggesting that pain is not reliably evoked by direct cortical stimulation in the same way as some other sensory experiences.
They also discuss observations involving stimulation of subcortical regions.
These findings motivate their argument that the subjective component of pain may depend critically on deeper circuitry.
But stimulation experiments have limitations.
An electrode influences particular populations of cells and fibers under specific conditions.
Failure to evoke an experience does not prove that the stimulated tissue has no role in generating it.
Similarly, producing a sensation through stimulation does not establish that the stimulated structure ordinarily acts alone.
The full mechanism requires more than a stimulation response.
7. Why Brainstem Injuries Matter
Clinical neurology provides another important source of evidence.
Damage to certain brainstem structures can cause profound disturbances of arousal and consciousness.
In some cases, relatively localized injuries can contribute to coma.
This is partly because the brainstem contains essential ascending systems that support wakefulness.
By contrast, some individuals with extensive cortical injuries retain certain forms of wakefulness and responsiveness.
Devor and Baron interpret these observations as evidence favoring a fundamental brainstem contribution to consciousness itself.
However, there is an important alternative explanation.
A brainstem structure may be necessary to maintain the physiological conditions that allow consciousness without being the sole location where subjective experience is generated.
For example, damaging an essential arousal pathway can disrupt activity throughout widespread neural networks.
The resulting loss of responsiveness does not necessarily identify a single anatomical source of awareness.
This distinction between a necessary supporting system and the generator of a process is critical.
8. The Ascending Reticular Activating System
One of the most important established brainstem systems is the ascending reticular activating system, often abbreviated ARAS.
This term refers to interconnected neural pathways contributing to arousal and wakefulness.
These systems involve brainstem nuclei and their connections with thalamic, hypothalamic, basal forebrain, and cortical structures.
They use several neurotransmitters and neuromodulators to influence activity across the brain.
The brainstem's role in arousal is not scientifically controversial.
What remains debated is how this activity relates to subjective experience.
Does the ARAS simply maintain the conditions under which cortical networks can generate consciousness?
Or do particular brainstem computations participate more directly in the experience of being conscious?
The new theory argues for a stronger brainstem role.
Other models emphasize that arousal and conscious content emerge through distributed network interactions.
9. What General Anesthesia Reveals
General anesthesia provides another opportunity to investigate consciousness.
Certain anesthetic drugs can produce reversible loss of responsiveness and awareness.
Researchers study how these compounds alter activity in neural circuits.
Anesthetic effects involve multiple molecular targets and brain networks.
Different agents can produce unconsciousness through partly different mechanisms.
Brainstem pathways contribute to the regulation of arousal.
Thalamocortical and cortical network activity also change during anesthesia.
Devor and Baron interpret selected anesthetic findings as evidence that particular brainstem circuits may be especially important.
But anesthesia cannot be reduced to a single mechanism operating in one location.
The disappearance of behavioral responsiveness does not always establish the complete absence of subjective experience.
Researchers therefore distinguish unconsciousness, unresponsiveness, amnesia, and altered awareness.
These distinctions matter when interpreting studies of anesthetic drugs.
10. The Difference Between Being Awake and Being Aware
Consider two different neurological situations.
In one, a person is deeply unconscious following severe brain injury.
In another, a person is awake but unable to communicate normally.
Their outward responses may be profoundly limited.
But the underlying neurological states may differ.
For example, locked-in syndrome can leave individuals conscious while severely restricting voluntary movement.
Other disorders of consciousness involve varying degrees of arousal and awareness.
Clinical researchers use behavioral examinations, imaging, and neurophysiological methods to investigate these differences.
The brainstem hypothesis may encourage new ways of examining relevant pathways.
However, it does not establish a new diagnostic method for determining whether a particular patient is conscious.
Questions involving clinical awareness require established assessment methods and careful specialist evaluation.
11. What Do Cortex-Centered Theories Propose?
Several influential theories give central roles to cortical processing.
One is global neuronal workspace theory.
In simplified terms, it proposes that selected information becomes consciously accessible when it is amplified and made available across distributed neural systems.
Another is integrated information theory.
This framework emphasizes properties of information integration within a physical system.
Other approaches emphasize recurrent processing, posterior cortical networks, or the interaction of multiple neural structures.
These theories differ in important ways.
They should not be treated as a single unified cortical explanation.
Nevertheless, they share an interest in identifying measurable relationships between neural organization and conscious experience.
The brainstem theory proposes a different division of labor.
It assigns a more fundamental role to subcortical circuitry in producing subjective awareness.
12. A Major 2025 Experiment Tested Competing Theories
In April 2025, an international research collaboration published an important study in Nature.
The investigators compared predictions from global neuronal workspace theory and integrated information theory.
Rather than allowing each group to interpret separate evidence, researchers agreed in advance on experimental predictions and evaluation methods.
The study involved 256 human participants and combined multiple neuroimaging and electrophysiological approaches.
The results supported some predictions while challenging others.
Neither theory emerged with all its key predictions confirmed.
This was an important scientific development.
It demonstrated that consciousness theories can be evaluated through experiments designed to distinguish among competing explanations.
The brainstem hypothesis would benefit from similarly explicit, independently testable predictions.
A scientifically interesting theory becomes more valuable when researchers can design experiments capable of showing where it is wrong.
13. Could the Brainstem and Cortex Both Be Essential?
An important possibility is that consciousness depends on interactions among multiple levels of the nervous system.
The brainstem contributes to arousal.
Thalamic systems influence cortical activity and information processing.
Cortical networks contribute to perceptual content and cognitive access.
Other subcortical regions participate in motivation, attention, and behavioral regulation.
It is therefore reasonable to investigate whether different neural systems contribute different necessary components of conscious experience.
This does not resolve the philosophical question of why neural activity feels like anything.
But it provides a framework for experimentally separating functions.
Instead of asking whether the brainstem or cortex is exclusively responsible, researchers can investigate which processes depend on each structure and which require their interactions.
14. What Does the Theory Mean for Animals?
The paper also raises evolutionary questions.
The brainstem contains ancient neural systems shared, in varying forms, across vertebrates.
If basic subjective awareness can arise from particular subcortical computations, consciousness may not require the full architecture of the mammalian neocortex.
That possibility has implications for research into animal sentience.
However, scientists cannot reliably determine subjective experience in other species simply by identifying anatomical similarities.
Behavioral evidence, comparative neuroanatomy, physiology, and evolutionary analysis all contribute.
Even when animals possess comparable neural structures, the relevant functions may differ.
The 2026 paper provides an evolutionary argument.
It does not demonstrate precisely which animal species are conscious or what their subjective experiences are like.
15. Does This Change How Scientists Should Think About Pain?
Potentially, but not in the sense of overturning current pain medicine.
The paper encourages researchers to examine whether subcortical pathways contribute to the subjective experience of pain in ways that remain incompletely understood.
This is particularly interesting because nociception, reflexive withdrawal, pain unpleasantness, and conscious pain perception are not identical.
Different aspects of pain may depend on different neural circuits.
A person can experience pain without obvious tissue damage.
Conversely, certain neural responses to harmful stimuli can occur without conscious awareness.
Better understanding these distinctions could improve experimental models.
However, the brainstem theory does not establish a new analgesic target.
It does not identify a clinically validated intervention.
And it does not mean cortical contributions to pain can be disregarded.
16. Could This Improve Our Understanding of Coma and Disorders of Consciousness?
Disorders of consciousness present major challenges for patients, families, and clinicians.
Researchers investigate why some patients regain awareness after brain injury while others do not.
A better understanding of brainstem–thalamic–cortical interactions may eventually improve the interpretation of neurological measurements.
Scientists may investigate connectivity, arousal pathways, brainstem integrity, and patterns of neural responsiveness.
The 2026 theory could generate hypotheses about which brainstem circuits are especially important.
But hypotheses must be validated before influencing clinical decisions.
The existence of a proposed consciousness circuit does not mean that stimulating it would reliably restore consciousness.
Nor does it provide a way to predict recovery in individual patients.
Such applications require substantial independent research.
17. Where Does AI Fit Into Consciousness Research?
Questions about consciousness increasingly appear in discussions of artificial intelligence.
Modern AI systems can process information, generate language, recognize patterns, and perform complex tasks.
But functional performance is not the same as evidence of subjective experience.
The Devor–Baron theory emphasizes the possibility that specific biological circuitry contributes fundamentally to consciousness.
Other theories emphasize different computational or organizational properties.
No generally accepted experimental method currently establishes whether an AI system has subjective experience.
The new paper does not resolve that question.
Its contribution is to offer one biological hypothesis about the neural processes that might underlie sentience.
For scientific communication, the distinction between intelligent behavior and demonstrated conscious experience remains important.
18. What This Means for Biotech International Institute
At Biotech International Institute, our research-stage portfolio involves neurological small molecules and precision peptide concepts.
This paper is relevant mainly as an example of the evolving relationship between molecular neuroscience and neural systems.
Neurophorol™
Our cannabinoid-inspired, CB2-oriented research direction addresses receptor pharmacology and neuroimmune-related mechanisms.
The brainstem theory provides no evidence that Neurophorol™ affects consciousness or the circuits proposed by its authors.
Mycophorol™
Our fungal-inspired research direction involves hypotheses concerning neural resilience and neurotrophic signaling.
Changes in cellular plasticity or neural signaling cannot automatically be interpreted as changes in consciousness.
The paper did not investigate Mycophorol™.
NeuroReset™
Our recovery-biology program explores hypotheses involving post-dependency neural adaptation and stress-related signaling.
The distinction between arousal, awareness, perception, and behavioral response is relevant to how neuroscience interprets functional outcomes.
However, no NeuroReset™ effects on brainstem consciousness mechanisms have been demonstrated.
NeuroRelief-P™
Our investigational peptide research direction includes pain-related biological questions.
The paper underscores the importance of distinguishing peripheral nociceptive signaling from conscious pain experience.
It does not establish a molecular target or therapeutic effect for NeuroRelief-P™.
For BII, the central lesson is methodological: a theory about a complex neural phenomenon cannot be treated as experimental evidence for an investigational molecule.
19. Why Scientific Disagreement Is Valuable
Scientific progress is not always a matter of accumulating evidence for one increasingly popular explanation.
Sometimes it requires questioning an assumption that has shaped research for decades.
The brainstem theory is provocative because it challenges where researchers should search for the most fundamental components of awareness.
But its scientific value depends on what happens next.
Can independent laboratories test its predictions?
Can the proposed brainstem circuitry be defined more precisely?
Could stimulation or recording studies distinguish between its predictions and those of alternative models?
Can the authors' interpretation of pain and clinical injury be separated from competing explanations?
And would the theory explain observations that cortical or distributed-network models cannot?
These questions turn debate into a research program.
20. What Scientists Still Need to Discover
Several major questions remain unanswered.
Which brainstem neuronal populations are essential for conscious awareness?
How do their activities differ between wakefulness, dreaming, anesthesia, and coma?
Can researchers separate the neural processes that sustain arousal from those involved in subjective experience?
Does conscious pain require a different anatomical organization from conscious vision or hearing?
What role does the thalamus play in connecting brainstem and cortical systems?
Can consciousness-related activity be distinguished from attention and behavioral reporting?
How should competing theories be evaluated when they use different definitions of consciousness?
And can neuroscience develop experimental methods that more directly investigate subjective experience?
These questions will determine whether the brainstem hypothesis becomes an influential explanatory framework or requires substantial revision.
Closing Thought: Perhaps Consciousness Cannot Be Explained by Looking at One Brain Region Alone
The human brain is not simply a collection of separate anatomical structures.
Its functions emerge through interactions among cells, circuits, and networks.
The cortex performs extraordinary computations.
The brainstem regulates essential physiological states.
The thalamus helps coordinate communication across major neural systems.
And numerous other structures contribute to perception, motivation, memory, and behavior.
The new brainstem theory asks whether the most fundamental subjective component of awareness may depend on neural machinery deeper in the brain than many researchers have emphasized.
That possibility deserves careful investigation.
But an intriguing hypothesis must not be mistaken for an established discovery.
We know that brainstem systems are essential to normal arousal. We do not yet know whether they independently generate the subjective experience of being conscious.
For Biotech International Institute, this is a fitting reminder that some of the most important scientific questions remain unresolved even after decades of research.
The goal is not to defend a preferred explanation.
It is to identify experiments capable of distinguishing among explanations.
Perhaps the next major advance in consciousness research will not come from locating a single center of awareness.
It may come from understanding how different neural systems jointly make conscious experience possible.
Mechanism First. Validation Always.
Biotech International Institute
Research-stage. Built for validation.
Science. People. Communities. A Healthier Tomorrow.
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Scientific References
1. Devor, M., & Baron, M. (2026).
Brainstem Theory of Consciousness.
The Neuroscientist. Published online August 25, 2026.
2. Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante, O., Gorska-Klimowska, U., et al. (2025).
Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness.
Nature, 642, 133–142.
3. Advances in understanding and treating disorders of consciousness caused by brainstem injury (2025).
Review of brainstem injury, arousal systems, and disorders of consciousness.
4. Brainstem control of sleep, wakefulness, alertness, and consciousness (2026).
Review of brainstem arousal systems and their interactions with wider neural networks.
Research disclosure: This article discusses competing scientific explanations of consciousness. The Devor–Baron brainstem proposal is a theory, not proof that subjective awareness originates in a specific anatomical location. No clinical intervention has been established from this framework. BII's neurological programs remain investigational, and no therapeutic or consciousness-related effects are being claimed.
