In Scientific American this month, UCal Santa Barbara neuroscientist and philosopher Tamlyn Hunt offers some thoughts on electromagnetism and consciousness:

While neuroscientists have long focused on spikes travelling throughout brain cells, “ephaptic” field effects may really be the primary mechanism for consciousness and cognition. These effects, resulting from the electric fields produced by neurons rather than their synaptic firings, may play a leading role in our mind’s workings.

In 1943 American scientists first described what is known today as the neural code, or spike code. They fleshed out a detailed map of how logical operations can be completed with the “all or none” nature of neural firing—similar to how today’s computers work. Since then neuroscientists around the world have engaged in a vast endeavor to crack the neural code in order to understand the specifics of cognition and consciousness. “Consciousness Might Hide in Our Brains’ Electric Fields,”” November 8, 2024

And then he says something quite interesting and possibly unexpected: “The most obvious chasm in our understanding is in all the things we did not meet on our journey from your eye to your hand,” confessed neuroscientist Mark Humphries in 2020’s The Spike, a deep dive into this journey: “All the things of the mind I’ve not been able to tell you about, because we know so little of what spikes do to make them.”

Mark Humphries, Chair in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Nottingham. He writes essays addressed to the lay public at The Spike in addition to being the author of the book, The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds (Princeton 2021).

It is reasonable to believe that generations of neuroscientists will be at this question a long time.