Video: A neuropsychologist traces consciousness to the upper brainstem, where feeling may begin before thought.

A child with little cortex can still giggle. If feeling comes from the upper brainstem, thought is the late arrival.

A child with little cortex can still giggle or startle. Mark Solms argues that raw feeling begins in the upper brainstem, before thought, vision, or self-awareness. If that holds, consciousness is less a crown worn by the cortex than a pulse of feeling shared across animals and perhaps machines. The search for mind starts beneath thought.

• What it could changeA brainstem-first model would move the search for consciousness toward feeling, not just complex thought.
• How it touches todayIt reaches into how we judge awareness in infants, patients, animals, and machines.
• Our futureIf feeling starts before thought, our circle of moral concern could begin long before a mind can speak.

• Solms’s podcast argument places elemental feeling in upper-brainstem systems and uses dreaming, REM dissociation, and children with little cortex as supporting cases.youtube +1
• A 2026 review argues that ascending arousal networks and the periaqueductal gray sustain wakefulness and give it affective value, while raising the possibility of primitive feeling late in gestation.link
• The brainstem theory argues that pain can be consciously experienced without cortical processing and that brainstem lesions or anesthesia can cause loss of consciousness.journals