So they may be essential to basic plumbing shared by many species, but not otherwise a game-changing factor for "consciousness" or "intelligence".
All this information is serialized onto pretty much 5 channels (excluding things like one's sense of balance, or the awareness of how your body is posed), all streamed concurrently.
Sounds like a recipe for high bandwidth consumption. Many cycles per second.
Based on this, I'd wager we (and our perception of self) only exist in the ether between our body's neurons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vestibular_system
built-in to give us the sense of balance:
Says who? Just because you can invent categories doesn't mean you've identified channels. That would be like walking up to a computer, say "pictures, sounds, storage", and assume that the computer must contain 3 enormous channels dedicated to each type of information.
Masgrau et al. (2006) Atomic Description of an Enzyme Reaction Dominated by Proton Tunneling