Why Conscious Gating Locks onto the Theta Frequency: A First-Principles Account English Version
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Recent intracranial evidence shows that high-order thalamic nuclei gate conscious perception through thalamofrontal loops, with information flowing from thalamus to prefrontal cortex; yet why gating locks onto the theta band and why its failure is all-or-none remain empirical observations without a first-principles account. Starting from three axioms (finite resources, non-equilibrium maintenance, and discrete input), this paper builds a dual-configuration architecture under an information capacity frame and derives a bidirectional critical feasible domain for temporal span and reconstruction activity. The minimal temporal window is fixed logically by the minimal construction of three-segment cross-moment attribution, and in carbon-based nervous systems its value necessarily converges to a few theta cycles, that is, sub-second and about 0.4 to 0.8 s. This explains the rigid locking of theta rhythms to conscious gating from physical boundary conditions rather than data fitting, and re-describes conscious perception as a critical transition of cross-moment temporal integration. The framework yields experimentally testable morphological criteria for such transitions and a quantitative scaling of the upper window bound.
Author: Wang, Jiaping
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204490428
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