Koubeissi, M. Z., Bartolomei, F., Beltagy, A., & Picard, F. (2014). Electrical stimulation of a small brain area reversibly disrupts consciousness. Epilepsy & Behavior, 37, 32-35.
This center cuts off awakeness, not (just) consciousness. Inactivating the claustrum seems to put the subject into an immobile trance that is not sleep (which is an active dynamical state) but a kind of “suspended animation.”
But consciousness means feeling — feeling anything at all. It is not (just) awakeness.
If something could “cut off” feeling while leaving “doing” intact (moving, talking, etc.), then it would make us into the Zombies that we would have been if we were not conscious. (Now that would be a real “on-off” switch!)
But there is no such center, or switch. Because consciousness is much more fundamental and pervasive than mere awakeness.
And for some reason that no one can understand or explain, there (probably) cannot be Zombies — at least not with human-scale (or probably even any biological-scale) doing-capacity. To be able to explain how and why that is the case would require solving the mind/body problem (the “hard” problem).
By the way, like claustrum inhibition, general anaesthesia too cuts of awakeness but it also induces a lot of other accompanying changes in state along with it. (Maybe, if it is not harmful, claustrum inhibition could be used for surgery instead of pharmacologically inducing sleep or coma?)
And local anaesthesia merely cuts off sensation (which also happens to be felt): It makes the stimulation of the anesthesized location unfelt (but of course it leaves all other feeling intact).
