Consciousness Begins in the Body, Not the Mind, Groundbreaking Study Finds. Could That Save Countless Coma Patients?

“I think, therefore I am,” René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher and mathematician, famously wrote in 1637. His idea was straightforward: even if your senses, the world, or your body deceives you, the very act of thinking proves you exist because there’s a thinker doing the thinking. Cogito, ergo sum, as the phrase goes in Latin, cemented the way the Western world would continue to define the self for the next 400 years—as a thinking mind, first and foremost.

But a growing body of neuroscience studies suggest the father of modern thought got it backward: the true foundation of consciousness isn’t thought, some scientists say—it’s feeling. A massive international study published in Nature late last month is further driving the theory forward. That means “I feel, therefore I am” may be the new maxim of consciousness. We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling bodies that think. And it’s more than a philosophical debate, too. Determining where consciousness resides could reshape life-or-death decisions and force society to rethink who, or what, truly counts as being self-aware.

The experiment used a rare “adversarial collaboration” model, bringing together scientists with opposing views to test two major theories of consciousness: integrated information theory (IIT) and global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT). Put simply, IIT says consciousness arises when information in the brain is deeply connected, especially in the back of the brain. GNWT argues that consciousness arises when the front of the brain broadcasts important information across a wide network, like a brain-wide alert.

In total, 256 people from 12 labs around the world looked at simple images (faces, objects, fonts) while undergoing brain scans like EEGs, fMRIs, and MEGs. This setup was “Vastly more than single-lab experiments that typically image or record from 10 or 20 subjects,” says Christof Koch, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist and meritorious investigator at the Allen Institute, who is best known for his work on the neural basis of consciousness. A long-time proponent of IIT, Koch coauthored the new study.

Koch and the rest of the team made three predictions to test the two consciousness theories:

1. Where is it? Does consciousness live in the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain involved in thinking, decision-making, and reasoning, as GNWT claims? Or does it live in the posterior cortex, the back part of the brain involved in processing sights, sounds, and bodily sensations, as IIT argues?
2. When does it show up? Is consciousness just a flash when we first notice something (GNWT), or does it stay active the whole time we’re aware (IIT)?
3. How does it work? Both camps agree consciousness requires a special kind of brain sync: high-frequency waves called gamma oscillations.

On location, the results were clear. “Here the evidence is decidedly in favor of the posterior cortex,” Koch says. “Either information pertaining to the conscious experience couldn’t be found in the front or it was far weaker than in the back [...] while the frontal lobes are critical to intelligence, judgement, reasoning etc., they are not critically involved in seeing, in conscious visual perception.”

On timing, Koch says the evidence “favors the hypothesis that for as long as the subject sees the stimulus, the posterior cortex remains active.”

But the third prediction proved trickier. “The data showed the existence of such oscillations, of such coupling, between the early visual cortical regions and the front (supporting GNWT), but not between these early regions and posterior cortex (going against IIT),” Koch notes. Basically, the brain’s “gamma sync” lit up between visual and frontal regions—backing GNWT—but didn’t show the same connection with the back of the brain, which IIT would have predicted.

There was no definitive winner in the battle between consciousness theories, though the study did tilt in favor of IIT. That’s because, based on the team’s results, when a person becomes aware of something, the back of the brain seems to do the heavy lifting—not the frontal “thinking” regions. This echoes the theory long championed by neuroscientists Antonio and Hanna Damasio: that consciousness begins with bodily feelings like hunger, pain, pleasure, and stress. Recently, the Damasios published an update on embodied consciousness, arguing that feelings generate the experiencer-self (the “I”), fusing body and mind into awareness. Consciousness begins in the body. Thinking evolved later.

But the April 2025 experiment wasn’t just a bras de fer between consciousness researchers in the ivory tower of academia.

“If we want to understand the substrate of consciousness, who has it (adults, pre-linguistic children, a second trimester fetus, a dog, a mouse, a squid, a raven, a fly, etc.) we need to identify the underlying mechanisms in the brain,” Koch says. And that has real implications for medicine.

“Practically, this is critical for the intensive care unit when dealing with patients in coma or in a vegetative state like Terry Schiavo,” Koch continues. [Schiavo was a 26-year-old Florida woman who collapsed from cardiac arrest in 1990 and remained in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. Her case became a national controversy over whether to remove life support, eventually resulting in her death in 2005 after her feeding tube was withdrawn].

“It’s also critical for patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome due to traumatic brain injury, stroke, cardiac arrest, overdose, etc.,” Koch says. “For if the patient remains in this unresponsive state for longer than a few days without signs of recovery, the clinical team initiates discussion with the family around ‘is this what they would have wanted?’”

Koch cites a figure that 70 to 90 percent of all such patients die due to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment. A recent scientific study may be unsettling for those who have fought—or are still fighting—for withdrawal decisions. The paper, published in August 2024 in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that approximately 25 percent of patients diagnosed with coma or vegetative state exhibit signs of covert consciousness. “Yet, they are unable to signal this at the bedside!” Koch says.

But for others, the shell might still be just a shell.

Jordan Conrad, Ph.D., a licensed social worker, psychotherapist, and philosopher specializing in the philosophy of medicine and consciousness, urges caution. “Every couple of years, someone claims to have found a physical or neural correlate of consciousness—and that correlate gets mistaken for consciousness itself. I think that’s a big mistake,” Conrad says. “These studies might be finding what causes consciousness—but they’re not finding consciousness itself.”

To illustrate, he uses a classic thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, proposed by Australian philosopher Frank Jackson in 1982. Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who knows everything about color—physics, neurology, perception. But she’s never seen color herself. Her entire life has been black and white. One day, she sees a red apple for the first time.

“The question is: Does she learn something new?,” asks Conrad. “My answer is: yes. She learns what it’s like to see the color red. Before, she knew everything physical there was to know—but she had never experienced it.” For him, that shows that physicalism isn’t the whole story. “There’s something inherently irreducible and experiential about consciousness. That can’t be captured just by physical information in the brain.”

One thing is clear: consciousness resists simplification—and perhaps explanation— altogether. But if the Damasios are right, if Koch’s data holds up, and if our bodies truly feel before they think—then Descartes’ most famous line may need a visceral rewrite.