Neuroscience Of Consciousness Research Articles

(Dis)confirming theories of consciousness and their predictions: towards a Lakatosian consciousness science.

The neuroscience of consciousness is undergoing a significant empirical acceleration thanks to several adversarial collaborations that intend to test different predictions of rival theories of consciousness. In this context, it is important to pair consciousness science with confirmation theory, the philosophical discipline that explores the interaction between evidence and hypotheses, in order to understand how exactly, and to what extent, specific experiments are challenging or validating theories of consciousness. In this paper, I examine this intricate relationship by adopting a Lakatosian lens. I propose that Lakatos' philosophy of science can aid consciousness scientists to better interpret adversarial collaborations in consciousness science and, more generally, to develop a confirmation-theoretic model of theory-appraisal in this field. I do so by suggesting that such a model be built upon three Lakatos-inspired criteria for assessing the relationship between empirical evidence and theoretical predictions: (i) the model should represent the 'distinction between prediction and accommodation'; (ii) the model should represent the 'structural relevance' of predictions; (iii) the model should represent the 'boldness' of the predictions. I argue that a Lakatosian model of theory-appraisal has both normative and descriptive virtues, and can move the debate forward by acknowledging that theory-appraisal needs to consider the diachronic development of theories, their logical structure, and their relationship with background beliefs and knowledge.

Exploring the role of structuralist methodology in the neuroscience of consciousness: a defense and analysis.

Traditional contrastive analysis has been the foundation of consciousness science, but its limitations due to the lack of a reliable method for measuring states of consciousness have prompted the exploration of alternative approaches. Structuralist theories have gained attention as an alternative that focuses on the structural properties of phenomenal experience and seeks to identify their neural encoding via structural similarities between quality spaces and neural state spaces. However, the intertwining of philosophical assumptions about structuralism and structuralist methodology may pose a challenge to those who are skeptical of the former. In this paper, I offer an analysis and defense of structuralism as a methodological approach in consciousness science, which is partly independent of structuralist assumptions on the nature of consciousness. By doing so, I aim to make structuralist methodology more accessible to a broader scientific and philosophical audience. I situate methodological structuralism in the context of questions concerning mental representation, psychophysical measurement, holism, and functional relevance of neural processes. At last, I analyze the relationship between the structural approach and the distinction between conscious and unconscious states.

Neuroscience of consciousness: cognition, physics and philosophy of decoding the human brain

The biophysical roots of consciousness have been the subject of an ongoing debate for centuries. In order to understand the data, create novel experimental methodologies, and increase our ability to investigate this phenomenon of interest, the proposed theories must lead to empirical, repeatable, and testifiable studies. Contemporary theories of consciousness often do not relate to one another, and none of them has been distinguished as complete or proven empirically so far. The aim of this study is an investigation into some of the possible approaches that could merge neuronal brain activity with the laws of physics and some philosophical principles that may be associated with the emergence of consciousness in the first place. As a result, the relationship between consciousness and attention, working memory, access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness is evaluated. The contrast between conscious and unconscious perception, perceived visual inputs and subliminal ones is investigated to facilitate a discussion about the neural correlates of self-awareness. Consciousness as a global broadcast of information to integrated brain modules is being considered, as well as viewing a brain as a parallel information processor linked to attention inputs. Relationship between consciousness and attention is explored, as well as attention without consciousness and vice versa. Implications and shortcomings of the proposed approaches based on brain science, philosophy and quantum physics are also covered to shed some more light on this ever present experience of being conscious that everyone seems to self-witness but no one manages to adequately explain.

Neuroscience of consciousness in the locked-in syndrome: Prognostic and diagnostic review.

The neurological illness known as a locked-in syndrome is brought on by damage to the brainstem, usually as a consequence of a stroke. It is characterized by total paralysis with intact consciousness and cognitive capacity. The subjective experiences of people with locked-in syndrome are poorly understood. Presently, there is no systematic evaluation developed to describe them. The most compelling resources come from individuals' own words; however, only a small fraction of these accounts have been explored. When it comes to bioethics, locked-in syndrome protocols are almost completely absent. Investigations on how people with this condition feel about their sense of continuity are of importance. Utilizing the locked-in syndrome to pose questions on embodied cognition and levels of consciousness could serve as a lens through which to examine problems in the phenomenology of neuroparalysis and communication. Care and quality of patients' lives might be improved by an effort to understand this condition better, and ontological questions like "what makes a person a person?,""what makes a person appear in continuity?,"and "what are the dynamics of embodiment and intersubjectivity?" might be better explored through that lens. This article aims to explore some biomedical factors that contribute to locked-in syndrome and offers some prognostic and diagnostic recommendations for this rare condition.

The vision of haptics tunes the somatosensory threshold

The interaction between different sensory modalities represents a crucial issue in the neuroscience of consciousness: when the processing of one modality is deficient, the concomitant presentation of stimuli of other spared modalities may sustain the restoration of the damaged sensory functions. In this regard, visual enhancement of touch may represent a viable tool in rehabilitating tactile disorders, yet the specific visual features mostly modulating the somatosensory experience remain unsettled.In this study, healthy subjects underwent a tactile detection task during the observation of videos displaying different contents, including static gratings, meaningless motions and natural or point-lights reach-to-grasp-and-manipulate actions. Concurrently, near-threshold stimuli were delivered to the median nerve at different time-points. The subjective report was collected after each trial; the sensory detection rate was computed and compared across video conditions.Our results indicate that the specific presence of haptic contents (i.e., the vision of manipulation), either fully displayed or implied by point-lights, magnifies tactile sensitivity. The notion that such stimuli prompt a conscious tactile experience opens to novel rehabilitation approaches for tactile consciousness disorders.

Theories of consciousness.

Recent years have seen a blossoming of theories about the biological and physical basis of consciousness. Good theories guide empirical research, allowing us to interpret data, develop new experimental techniques and expand our capacity to manipulate the phenomenon of interest. Indeed, it is only when couched in terms of a theory that empirical discoveries can ultimately deliver a satisfying understanding of a phenomenon. However, in the case of consciousness, it is unclear how current theories relate to each other, or whether they can be empirically distinguished. To clarify this complicated landscape, we review four prominent theoretical approaches to consciousness: higher-order theories, global workspace theories, re-entry and predictive processing theories and integrated information theory. We describe the key characteristics of each approach by identifying which aspects of consciousness they propose to explain, what their neurobiological commitments are and what empirical data are adduced in their support. We consider how some prominent empirical debates might distinguish among these theories, and we outline three ways in which theories need to be developed to deliver a mature regimen of theory-testing in the neuroscience of consciousness. There are good reasons to think that the iterative development, testing and comparison of theories of consciousness will lead to a deeper understanding of this most profound of mysteries.

The ConTraSt database for analysing and comparing empirical studies of consciousness theories.

Understanding how consciousness arises from neural activity remains one of the biggest challenges for neuroscience. Numerous theories have been proposed in recent years, each gaining independent empirical support. Currently, there is no comprehensive, quantitative and theory-neutral overview of the field that enables an evaluation of how theoretical frameworks interact with empirical research. We provide a bird's eye view of studies that interpreted their findings in light of at least one of four leading neuroscientific theories of consciousness (N = 412 experiments), asking how methodological choices of the researchers might affect the final conclusions. We found that supporting a specific theory can be predicted solely from methodological choices, irrespective of findings. Furthermore, most studies interpret their findings post hoc, rather than a priori testing critical predictions of the theories. Our results highlight challenges for the field and provide researchers with an open-access website ( https://ContrastDB.tau.ac.il ) to further analyse trends in the neuroscience of consciousness.

The Problem of Consciousness: The Experiential Approach of Luigi Giussani and the Foundation of the Conception of Consciousness in Neuroscience

The relationship between consciousness and brain, subject and body, appears today far away from being elucidated. All attempts to reduce consciousness and subject to the brain end up abolishing the subject, i.e., what is evidently most relevant for each one of us. Luigi Giussani proposes a method to investigate human consciousness based on the analysis of oneself personal experience, verifiable by every human being. He is very attentive to avoiding during the experiential analysis interference of prejudices, ideological conceptions, and conjectures. His method remains perfectly coherent and open to all contributions from neuroscience and scientific discoveries. He leaves completely open the major question about the relationship between brain physical-chemical functioning and subjective experience, individual consciousness. A comparison between Giussani’s method and the starting point and the fundamental assumption that lays the basis of various modern neuroscientific conceptions of consciousness is conducted. A discussion about the assumption that stays at the basis of the various neuroscientific currents appears necessary and the method proposed by Giussani may constitute a common and acceptable by everyone background for future development and advances in studying the greatest problem of our culture, the relation between brain and human consciousness.

Tonic somatosensory responses and deficits of tactile awareness converge in the parietal operculum.

Although clinical neuroscience and the neuroscience of consciousness have long sought mechanistic explanations of tactile-awareness disorders, mechanistic insights are rare, mainly because of the difficulty of depicting the fine-grained neural dynamics underlying somatosensory processes.Here, we combined the stereo-EEG responses to somatosensory stimulation with the lesion mapping of patients with a tactile-awareness disorder, namely tactile extinction.Whereas stereo-EEG responses present different temporal patterns, including early/phasic and long-lasting/tonic activities, tactile-extinction lesion mapping co-localizes only with the latter. Overlaps are limited to the posterior part of the perisylvian regions, suggesting that tonic activities may play a role in sustaining tactile awareness. To assess this hypothesis further, we correlated the prevalence of tonic responses with the tactile-extinction lesion mapping, showing that they follow the same topographical gradient. Finally, in parallel with the notion that visuotactile stimulation improves detection in tactile-extinction patients, we demonstrated an enhancement of tonic responses to visuotactile stimuli, with a strong voxel-wise correlation with the lesion mapping.The combination of these results establishes tonic responses in the parietal operculum as the ideal neural correlate of tactile awareness.

Don't tell anyone: the importance of no-report paradigms in neuroscience of consciousness.

The neural correlates of perceptual awareness are usually investigated by comparing experimental conditions in which subjects are aware or not aware of the delivered stimulus. This, however, implies that subjects report their experience, possibly biasing the neural responses with the postperceptual processes involved. This Neuro Forum article reviews evidence from an electroencephalography (EEG) study by Cohen and colleagues (Cohen M, Ortego K, Kyroudis A, Pitts M. J Neurosci 40: 4925-4935, 2020) addressing the importance of no-report paradigms in the neuroscience of consciousness. In particular, authors show that P3b, one of the proposed canonical "signatures" of the conscious processing, is strongly elicited only when subjects have to report their experience, proposing a reconsideration in the approach to the neuroscience of consciousness.

THE ONTOLOGY OF EXISTENCE: THE NEXT PARADIGM. A review of the book "THE IDEA OF THE WORLD: A MULTI-DISCIPLINARY ARGUMENT FOR THE MENTAL NATURE OF REALITY", by Bernardo Kastrup

In recent decades, attempts to create and argue a new ontology of existence that could provide a robust alternative to the mainstream physicalist metaphysics have been made in science and philosophy. A new book by Bernardo Kastrup (2019, 312 p.), a well-known specialist in the field of philosophy of mind and neuroscience of consciousness, offers the author's conceptually clear and rigorous formulation of the philosophical system. The author proves that appearance and reality in ontology are fundamentally experiential. A universal phenomenal consciousness is the sole ontological primitive, which patterns of excitation constitute existence, and a human being is dissociated mental complexes of this universal consciousness, surrounded like islands by the ocean of its mentation. Kastrup’s idea of the World has an idealist ontological underpinning. The author contrasts his vision of the world with the existing ideas of the world perception, such as physicalism, microexperientialism and cosmopsychism. The quality of the argument, which is given in the book, suggests the revival of the philosophy of idealism as the next paradigm, according to which a form of universal mind will be viewed as nature's sole fundamental entity.

Breakdown in the temporal and spatial organization of spontaneous brain activity during general anesthesia.

Which temporal features that can characterize different brain states (i.e., consciousness or unconsciousness) is a fundamental question in the neuroscience of consciousness. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI), we investigated the spatial patterns of two temporal features: the long-range temporal correlations (LRTCs), measured by power-law exponent (PLE), and temporal variability, measured by standard deviation (SD) during wakefulness and anesthetic-induced unconsciousness. We found that both PLE and SD showed global reductions across the whole brain during anesthetic state comparing to wakefulness. Importantly, the relationship between PLE and SD was altered in anesthetic state, in terms of a spatial "decoupling." This decoupling was mainly driven by a spatial pattern alteration of the PLE, rather than the SD, in the anesthetic state. Our results suggest differential physiological grounds of PLE and SD and highlight the functional importance of the topographical organization of LRTCs in maintaining an optimal spatiotemporal configuration of the neural dynamics during normal level of consciousness. The central role of the spatial distribution of LRTCs, reflecting temporo-spatial nestedness, may support the recently introduced temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC).

Many worlds in perspective

A minimal approach to the measurement problem and the quantum-to-classical transition assumes a universally valid quantum formalism, i.e. unitary time evolution governed by a Schrödinger-type equation. As had been pointed out long ago, in this view the measurement process can be described by decoherence which results in a ”Many-Worlds” or ”Many-Minds” scenario according to Everett and Zeh. A silent assumption for decoherence to proceed is however, that there exists incomplete information about the environment our object system gets entangled with in the measurement process. This paper addresses the question where this information is traced out and - by adopting recent approaches to model consciousness in neuroscience - argues that a rigorous interpretation results in a perspectival notion of the quantum-to-classical transition. The information that is or is not available in the consciousness of the observer is crucial for the definition of the environment (i.e. the unknown degrees of freedom in the remainder of the Universe). As such the Many-Worlds-Interpretation, while being difficult or impossible to probe in physics, may become testable in psychology.

Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, by Evan Thompson

Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, by Evan Thompson

Microdream neurophenomenology.

Nightly transitions into sleep are usually uneventful and transpire in the blink of an eye. But in the laboratory these transitions afford a unique view of how experience is transformed from the perceptually grounded consciousness of wakefulness to the hallucinatory simulations of dreaming. The present review considers imagery in the sleep-onset transition—“microdreams” in particular—as an alternative object of study to dreaming as traditionally studied in the sleep lab. A focus on microdream phenomenology has thus far proven fruitful in preliminary efforts to (i) develop a classification for dreaming’s core phenomenology (the “oneiragogic spectrum”), (ii) establish a structure for assessing dreaming’s multiple memory inputs (“multi-temporal memory sources”), (iii) further Silberer’s project for classifying sleep-onset images in relation to waking cognition by revealing two new imagery types (“autosensory imagery,” “exosensory imagery”), and (iv) embed a potential understanding of microdreaming processes in a larger explanatory framework (“multisensory integration approach”). Such efforts may help resolve outstanding questions about dream neurophysiology and dreaming’s role in memory consolidation during sleep but may also advance discovery in the neuroscience of consciousness more broadly.

Review of waking, dreaming, being: self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy, by Evan Thompson

Review of waking, dreaming, being: self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy, by Evan Thompson

Book Review: Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

Book Review: Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

Bridging East and West. In the Search for a New Approach to Consciousness. Remarks on the sidelines of the book by Evan Thompson Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New Yo

Bridging East and West. In the Search for a New Approach to Consciousness. Remarks on the sidelines of the book by Evan Thompson Waking, Dreaming, Being. Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, Columbia University Press, New Yo

Late EEG Responses Are Absent for Conscious But Task-Irrelevant Stimuli

Thousands of neural circuits are activated in our brains each second, but only some of them (quite mysteriously) give rise to conscious perception ([Koch, 2004][1]). The neuroscience of consciousness is the quest to identify these processes: a crucial pursuit with a wide range of applications, such

Précis of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy

Précis of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy Evan Thompson (bio) The central idea of Waking, Dreaming, Being is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity.1 The self isn’t something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm. It is an experiential process that is subject to constant change. We enact a self in the process of awareness, and this self comes and goes depending on how we are aware. When we’re awake and occupied with some manual task, we enact a bodily self geared to our immediate environment. Yet this bodily self recedes from our experience if our task becomes an absorbing mental one. If our mind wanders, the mentally imagined self of the past or future overtakes the self of the present moment. As we start to fall asleep, the sense of self slackens. Images float by, and our awareness becomes progressively absorbed in them. The impression of being a bounded individual distinct from the world dissolves. In this hypnagogic state, the borders between self and not-self seem to fall away. The feeling of being a distinct self immersed in the world comes back in the dream state. We experience the dream from the perspective of the self within it, or the dream ego. Although the entire dream world exists only as a content of our awareness, we identify our self with only a portion of it—the dream ego that centers our experience of the dream world and presents itself as the locus of our awareness. At times, however, something else happens. We realize we’re dreaming, but instead of waking up we keep right on dreaming with the knowledge that we’re dreaming. We enter what is called a lucid dream. Here we experience a different kind of awareness, one that witnesses the dream state. No matter what dream contents come and go, including the forms the dream ego takes, we can tell they’re not the same as our awareness of being in the dream state. We no longer identify only with our dream ego—the “I” as dreamed—for our sense of self now includes our dreaming self: the “I” as dreamer. Similarly, while meditating in the waking state, we can simply witness being conscious and watch whatever sensory or mental events occur within the field of our awareness. We can also watch how we may identify with some of them as “Me” or appropriate some of them as “Mine.” According to the Indian yogic traditions, which broadly construed include Buddhism, we can distinguish three aspects of consciousness.2 The first aspect is awareness, the second is the contents of awareness, and the third is how we experience some of these contents of awareness as “I” or “Me” or “Mine.” From this perspective, to understand how we enact a self we need to understand three things—the nature [End Page 927] of awareness and its sensory and mental contents, the mind-body processes that produce these contents, and how some of these contents come to be experienced as “I” or “Me” or “Mine.” In Waking, Dreaming, Being, I take this threefold framework of awareness, contents of awareness, and self-experience—or what the Indian tradition calls “I-making” (ahaṃkāra)—and put it to work in cognitive science. Whereas the Indian thinkers mapped consciousness and I-making in philosophical and phenomenological terms, I show how their insights can also help to advance the neuroscience of consciousness by weaving together neuroscience and Indian philosophy in an exploration of wakefulness, falling asleep, dreaming, lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, deep and dreamless sleep, forms of meditative awareness, and the process of dying. The organizing principle for the book comes from the Indian tradition, specifically from the Upaniṣads, which arguably contain the world’s first recorded map of consciousness. The earliest texts—the Bṛhadāraṇyaka and Chāndogya Upaniṣads—delineate three principal states of the self—the waking state, the dream state, and the state of deep and dreamless sleep. The later text of the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad adds a fourth state...