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(Dis)confirming theories of consciousness and their predictions: towards a Lakatosian consciousness science Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Niccolò Negro
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
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Neuroscience of the yogic theory of consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Vaibhav Tripathi, Pallavi Bharadwaj
Yoga as a practice and philosophy of life has been followed for more than 4500 years with known evidence of yogic practices in the Indus Valley Civilization. The last few decades have seen a resurgence in the utility of yoga and meditation as a practice with growing scientific evidence behind it. Significant scientific literature has been published, illustrating the benefits of yogic practices including
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Sources of richness and ineffability for phenomenally conscious states Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Xu Ji, Eric Elmoznino, George Deane, Axel Constant, Guillaume Dumas, Guillaume Lajoie, Jonathan Simon, Yoshua Bengio
Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical
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A novel, semi-automatic procedure for generating slow change blindness stimuli Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Haley G Frey, Lua Koenig, Biyu J He, Jan W Brascamp
Change blindness is the phenomenon that occurs when an observer fails to notice what would seem to be obvious changes in the features of a visual stimulus. Researchers can induce this experimentally by including visual disruptions (such as brief blanks) that coincide with the changes in question. However, change blindness can also occur in the absence of these disruptions if a change occurs sufficiently
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Pain suffering and the self. An active allostatic inference explanation Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Philip Gerrans
Distributed processing that gives rise to pain experience is anchored by a multidimensional self-model. I show how the phenomenon of pain asymbolia and other atypical pain-related conditions (Insensitivity to Pain, Chronic Pain, ‘Social’ Pain, Insensitivity to Pain, Chronic Pain, ‘Social’ Pain, empathy for pain and suffering) can be explained by this idea. It also explains the patterns of association
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A novel model of divergent predictive perception Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Reshanne R Reeder, Giovanni Sala, Tessa M van Leeuwen
Predictive processing theories state that our subjective experience of reality is shaped by a balance of expectations based on previous knowledge about the world (i.e. priors) and confidence in sensory input from the environment. Divergent experiences (e.g. hallucinations and synaesthesia) are likely to occur when there is an imbalance between one’s reliance on priors and sensory input. In a novel
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Covert cortical processing: a diagnosis in search of a definition Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Michael J Young, Matteo Fecchio, Yelena G Bodien, Brian L Edlow
Historically, clinical evaluation of unresponsive patients following brain injury has relied principally on serial behavioral examination to search for emerging signs of consciousness and track recovery. Advances in neuroimaging and electrophysiologic techniques now enable clinicians to peer into residual brain functions even in the absence of overt behavioral signs. These advances have expanded clinicians’
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Audiovisual interactions outside of visual awareness during motion adaptation Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Minsun Park, Randolph Blake, Chai-Youn Kim
Motion aftereffects (MAEs), illusory motion experienced in a direction opposed to real motion experienced during prior adaptation, have been used to assess audiovisual interactions. In a previous study from our laboratory, we demonstrated that a congruent direction of auditory motion presented concurrently with visual motion during adaptation strengthened the consequent visual MAE, compared to when
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Common computations for metacognition and meta-metacognition Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-12-02 Yunxuan Zheng, Samuel Recht, Dobromir Rahnev
Recent evidence shows that people have the meta-metacognitive ability to evaluate their metacognitive judgments of confidence. However, it is unclear whether meta-metacognitive judgments are made by a different system and rely on a separate set of computations compared to metacognitive judgments. To address this question, we asked participants (N = 36) to perform a perceptual decision-making task and
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Modeling and controlling the body in maladaptive ways: an active inference perspective on non-suicidal self-injury behaviors Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-11-28 Barca Laura, Domenico Maisto, Giovani Pezzulo
A significant number of persons engage in paradoxical behaviors, such as extreme food restriction (up to starvation) and non-suicidal self-injuries, especially during periods of rapid changes, such as adolescence. Here, we contextualize these and related paradoxical behavior within an active inference view of brain functions, which assumes that the brain forms predictive models of bodily variables
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Special Issue: Experiencing Well-BeingPlayfulness and the meaningful life: an active inference perspective. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-11-18 Julian Kiverstein,Mark Miller
Our paper takes as its starting point the recent proposal, at the core of this special issue, to use the active inference framework (AIF) to computationally model what it is for a person to live a meaningful life. In broad brushstrokes, the AIF takes experiences of human flourishing to be the result of predictions and uncertainty estimations along many dimensions at multiple levels of neurobiological
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The evolutionary origins of the Global Neuronal Workspace in vertebrates. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Oryan Zacks,Eva Jablonka
The Global Neuronal Workspace theory of consciousness offers an explicit functional architecture that relates consciousness to cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, memory, and evaluation. We show that the functional architecture of the Global Neuronal Workspace, which is based mainly on human studies, corresponds to the cognitive-affective architecture proposed by the Unlimited Associative
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Lifeworlds in pain: a principled method for investigation and intervention Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-09-13 Abby Tabor, Axel Constant
The experience of pain spans biological, psychological and sociocultural realms, both basic and complex, it is by turns necessary and devastating. Despite an extensive knowledge of the constituents of pain, the ability to translate this into effective intervention remains limited. It is suggested that current, multiscale, medical approaches, largely informed by the biopsychosocial (BPS) model, attempt
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Adversarial inference: predictive minds in the attention economy Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Jelle Bruineberg
What is it about our current digital technologies that seemingly makes it difficult for users to attend to what matters to them? According to the dominant narrative in the literature on the “attention economy,” a user’s lack of attention is due to the large amounts of information available in their everyday environments. I will argue that information-abundance fails to account for some of the central
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Modelling perception as a hierarchical competition differentiates imagined, veridical, and hallucinated percepts Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-08-23 Alexander A Sulfaro, Amanda K Robinson, Thomas A Carlson
Mental imagery is a process by which thoughts become experienced with sensory characteristics. Yet, it is not clear why mental images appear diminished compared to veridical images, nor how mental images are phenomenologically distinct from hallucinations, another type of non-veridical sensory experience. Current evidence suggests that imagination and veridical perception share neural resources. If
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On the non-uniqueness problem in integrated information theory Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Jake R Hanson, Sara I Walker
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) 3.0 is among the leading theories of consciousness in contemporary neuroscience. The core of the theory relies on the calculation of a scalar mathematical measure of consciousness, Φ, which is inspired by the phenomenological axioms of the theory. Here, we show that despite its widespread application, Φ is not a well-defined mathematical concept in the sense that
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Pattern breaking: a complex systems approach to psychedelic medicine Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-07-06 Inês Hipólito, Jonas Mago, Fernando E Rosas, Robin Carhart-Harris
Recent research has demonstrated the potential of psychedelic therapy for mental health care. However, the psychological experience underlying its therapeutic effects remains poorly understood. This paper proposes a framework that suggests psychedelics act as destabilizers, both psychologically and neurophysiologically. Drawing on the ‘entropic brain’ hypothesis and the ‘RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics’
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The Self-Simulational Theory of temporal extension Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Jan Erik Bellingrath
Subjective experience is experience in time. Unfolding in a continuous river of moments, our experience, however, consists not only in the changing phenomenological content per se but, further, in additional retrodiction and prospection of the moments that immediately preceded and followed it. It is in this way that William James’s ‘specious present’ presents itself as extending between the past and
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About the compatibility between the perturbational complexity index and the global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Michele Farisco, Jean-Pierre Changeux
This paper investigates the compatibility between the theoretical framework of the global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT) of conscious processing and the perturbational complexity index (PCI). Even if it has been introduced within the framework of a concurrent theory (i.e. Integrated Information Theory), PCI appears, in principle, compatible with the main tenet of GNWT, which is a conscious process
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When do parts form wholes? Integrated information as the restriction on mereological composition Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-06-02 Kelvin J McQueen, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Under what conditions are material objects, such as particles, parts of a whole object? This is the composition question and is a longstanding open question in philosophy. Existing attempts to specify a non-trivial restriction on composition tend to be vague and face serious counterexamples. Consequently, two extreme answers have become mainstream: composition (the forming of a whole by its parts)
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Separating weak integrated information theory into inspired and aspirational approaches Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Angus Leung, Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Mediano et al. (The strength of weak integrated information theory. Trends Cogn Sci 2022;26: 646–55.) separate out strong and weak flavours of the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. They describe ‘strong IIT’ as attempting to derive a universal formula for consciousness and ‘weak IIT’ as searching for empirically measurable correlates of aspects of consciousness. We put forward that
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Exploring the role of structuralist methodology in the neuroscience of consciousness: a defense and analysis Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-05-17 Lukas Kob
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
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Nonlinear brain correlates of trait self-boundarylessness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-04-25 Lena Lindström, Philippe Goldin, Johan Mårtensson, Etzel Cardeña
Alterations of the sense of self induced by meditation include an increased sense of boundarylessness. In this study, we investigated behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging correlates of trait self-boundarylessness during resting state and the performance of two experimental tasks. We found that boundarylessness correlated with greater self-endorsement of words related to fluidity and
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Towards causal mechanisms of consciousness through focused transcranial brain stimulation Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-04-21 Marek Havlík, Jaroslav Hlinka, Monika Klírová, Petr Adámek, Jiří Horáček
Conscious experience represents one of the most elusive problems of empirical science, namely neuroscience. The main objective of empirical studies of consciousness has been to describe the minimal sets of neural events necessary for a specific neuronal state to become consciously experienced. The current state of the art still does not meet this objective but rather consists of highly speculative
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Challenging the fixed-criterion model of perceptual decision-making Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jennifer Laura Lee, Rachel Denison, Wei Ji Ma
Perceptual decision-making is often conceptualized as the process of comparing an internal decision variable to a categorical boundary or criterion. How the mind sets such a criterion has been studied from at least two perspectives. One idea is that the criterion is a fixed quantity. In work on subjective phenomenology, the notion of a fixed criterion has been proposed to explain a phenomenon called
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Describing and explaining consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Bjørn Grinde
Consciousness is a property of advanced brains and as such a biological feature. Explaining biological features is somewhat different from explaining physical phenomena; in the former case, the key is to first define its functional role (the reason why it was selected) and then to outline the evolutionary trajectory leading to its presence. In the case of consciousness, there are reasonable models
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Piecing together the puzzle of emotional consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-04-06 Tahnée Engelen, Rocco Mennella
The search for neural correlates of emotional consciousness has gained momentum in the last decades. Nonetheless, disagreements concerning the mechanisms that determine the experiential qualities of emotional consciousness—the “what is it like” to feel an emotion—as well as on their neural correlates have far-reaching consequences on how researchers study and measure emotion, sometimes leading to seemingly
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Psychedelics, entropic brain theory, and the taxonomy of conscious states: a summary of debates and perspectives Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-04-04 Sidath Rankaduwa, Adrian M Owen
Given their recent success in counseling and psychiatry, the dialogue around psychedelics has mainly focused on their applications for mental health. Insights from psychedelic research, however, are not limited to treating mental health, but also have much to offer our current understanding of consciousness. The investigation of psychedelic states has offered new perspectives on how different aspects
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Correction to: Feeling ready: neural bases of prospective motor readiness judgements. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-03-29
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/niad003.].
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Time-consciousness in computational phenomenology: a temporal analysis of active inference Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Juan Diego Bogotá, Zakaria Djebbara
Time plays a significant role in science and everyday life. Despite being experienced as a continuous flow, computational models of consciousness are typically restricted to a sequential temporal structure. This difference poses a serious challenge for computational phenomenology—a novel field combining phenomenology and computational modelling. By analysing the temporal structure of the active inference
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Feeling ready: neural bases of prospective motor readiness judgements Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Elisabeth Parés-Pujolràs, Karla Matić, Patrick Haggard
The idea that human agents voluntarily control their actions, including their spontaneous movements, strongly implies an anticipatory awareness of action. That is, agents should be aware they are about to act before actually executing a movement. Previous research has identified neural signals that could underpin prospective conscious access to motor preparation, including the readiness potential and
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Toward the unknown: consciousness and pain Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Richard Ambron
Studies of consciousness are hindered by the complexity of the brain, but it is possible to study the consciousness of a sensation, namely pain. Three systems are necessary to experience pain: the somatosensory system conveys information about an injury to the thalamus where an awareness of the injury but not the painfulness emerges. The thalamus distributes the information to the affective system
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Adaptation in the sensory cortex drives bistable switching during auditory stream segregation Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-02-04 Nathan C Higgins, Alexandra N Scurry, Fang Jiang, David F Little, Claude Alain, Mounya Elhilali, Joel S Snyder
Current theories of perception emphasize the role of neural adaptation, inhibitory competition, and noise as key components that lead to switches in perception. Supporting evidence comes from neurophysiological findings of specific neural signatures in modality-specific and supramodal brain areas that appear to be critical to switches in perception. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to
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The functions of consciousness in visual processing Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2023-01-08 Dylan Ludwig
Conscious experiences form a relatively diverse class of psychological phenomena, supported by a range of distinct neurobiological mechanisms. This diversity suggests that consciousness occupies a variety of different functional roles across different task domains, individuals, and species; a position I call functional pluralism. In this paper, I begin to tease out some of the functional contributions
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Sense of self in mind and body: an eLORETA-EEG study Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-12-14 Zhongjie Bao, Paul Frewen
The human brain engages the sense of self through both semantic and somatic self-referential processing (SRP). Alpha and theta oscillations have been found to underlie SRP but have not been compared with respect to semantic and somatic SRP. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) from 50 participants during focused internal attention on life roles (e.g. “friend”) and outer body (e.g. “arms”) compared
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Investigating the shift between externally and internally oriented cognition: a novel task-switching paradigm Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-11-20 Sara Calzolari, Svetla Boneva, Davinia Fernández-Espejo
Despite our constant need to flexibly balance internal and external information, research on cognitive flexibility has focused solely on shifts between externally oriented tasks. In contrast, switches across internally oriented processes (and self-referential cognition specifically) and between internal and external domains have never been investigated. Here, we report a novel task-switching paradigm
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Confidence at the limits of human nested cognition Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Samuel Recht, Ljubica Jovanovic, Pascal Mamassian, Tarryn Balsdon
Metacognition is the ability to weigh the quality of our own cognition, such as the confidence that our perceptual decisions are correct. Here we ask whether metacognitive performance can itself be evaluated or else metacognition is the ultimate reflective human faculty. Building upon a classic visual perception task, we show that human observers are able to produce nested, above-chance judgements
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Does integrated information theory make testable predictions about the role of silent neurons in consciousness? Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-10-15 Gary Bartlett
Tononi et al. claim that their integrated information theory of consciousness makes testable predictions. This article discusses two of the more startling predictions, which follow from the theory’s claim that conscious experiences are generated by inactive as well as active neurons. The first prediction is that a subject’s conscious experience at a time can be affected by the disabling of neurons
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Beyond the veil of duality—topographic reorganization model of meditation Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-10-11 Austin Clinton Cooper, Bianca Ventura, Georg Northoff
Meditation can exert a profound impact on our mental life, with proficient practitioners often reporting an experience free of boundaries between a separate self and the environment, suggesting an explicit experience of “nondual awareness.” What are the neural correlates of such experiences and how do they relate to the idea of nondual awareness itself? In order to unravel the effects that meditation
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Neurophenomenal structuralism. A philosophical agenda for a structuralist neuroscience of consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-08-23 Holger Lyre
The program of “neurophenomenal structuralism” is presented as an agenda for a genuine structuralist neuroscience of consciousness that seeks to understand specific phenomenal experiences as strictly relational affairs. The paper covers a broad range of topics. It starts from considerations about neural change detection and relational coding that motivate a solution of the Newman problem of the brain
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An academic survey on theoretical foundations, common assumptions and the current state of consciousness science Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Jolien C Francken, Lola Beerendonk, Dylan Molenaar, Johannes J Fahrenfort, Julian D Kiverstein, Anil K Seth, Simon van Gaal
We report the results of an academic survey into the theoretical and methodological foundations, common assumptions, and the current state of the field of consciousness research. The survey consisted of 22 questions and was distributed on two different occasions of the annual meeting of the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2018 and 2019). We examined responses from 166 consciousness
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The positive evidence bias in perceptual confidence is unlikely post-decisional Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Jason Samaha, Rachel Denison
Confidence in a perceptual decision is a subjective estimate of the accuracy of one’s choice. As such, confidence is thought to be an important computation for a variety of cognitive and perceptual processes, and it features heavily in theorizing about conscious access to perceptual states. Recent experiments have revealed a “positive evidence bias” (PEB) in the computations underlying confidence reports
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Editing reality in the brain Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-07-23 Eamonn Walsh, David A Oakley
Recent information technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) allow the creation of simulated sensory worlds with which we can interact. Using programming language, digital details can be overlaid onto displays of our environment, confounding what is real and what has been artificially engineered. Natural language, particularly the use of direct verbal suggestion (DVS) in
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Determining states of consciousness in the electroencephalogram based on spectral, complexity, and criticality features Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Nike Walter, Thilo Hinterberger
This study was based on the contemporary proposal that distinct states of consciousness are quantifiable by neural complexity and critical dynamics. To test this hypothesis, it was aimed at comparing the electrophysiological correlates of three meditation conditions using nonlinear techniques from the complexity and criticality framework as well as power spectral density. Thirty participants highly
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Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-04-25 Axel Cleeremans, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
‘Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?’ In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents
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Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-04-25 Axel Cleeremans,Catherine Tallon-Baudry
'Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?' In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience-'What it feels like'-is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents
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Importance, limits and caveats of the use of “disorders of consciousness” to theorize consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-03-30 Bertrand Hermann, Aude Sangaré, Esteban Munoz-Musat, Amina Ben Salah, Pauline Perez, Mélanie Valente, Frédéric Faugeras, Vadim Axelrod, Sophie Demeret, Clémence Marois, Nadya Pyatigorskaya, Marie-Odile Habert, Aurélie Kas, Jacobo D Sitt, Benjamin Rohaut, Lionel Naccache
The clinical and fundamental exploration of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DoC) is commonly used by researchers both to test some of their key theoretical predictions and to serve as a unique source of empirical knowledge about possible dissociations between consciousness and cognitive and/or neural processes. For instance, the existence of states of vigilance free of any self-reportable
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Functions of consciousness: conceptual clarification Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-03-29 Takuya Niikawa, Katsunori Miyahara, Hiro Taiyo Hamada, Satoshi Nishida
There are many theories of the functions of consciousness. How these theories relate to each other, how we should assess them, and whether any integration of them is possible are all issues that remain unclear. To contribute to a solution, this paper offers a conceptual framework to clarify the theories of the functions of consciousness. This framework consists of three dimensions: (i) target, (ii)
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Time and time again: a multi-scale hierarchical framework for time-consciousness and timing of cognition Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-03-25 Ishan Singhal, Narayanan Srinivasan
Temporality and the feeling of ‘now’ is a fundamental property of consciousness. Different conceptualizations of time-consciousness have argued that both the content of our experiences and the representations of those experiences evolve in time, or neither have temporal extension, or only content does. Accounting for these different positions, we propose a nested hierarchical model of multiple timescales
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Capacity for consciousness under ketamine anaesthesia is selectively associated with activity in posteromedial cortex in rats Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-03-04 A Arena, B E Juel, R Comolatti, S Thon, J F Storm
It remains unclear how specific cortical regions contribute to the brain’s overall capacity for consciousness. Clarifying this could help distinguish between theories of consciousness. Here, we investigate the association between markers of regionally specific (de)activation and the brain’s overall capacity for consciousness. We recorded electroencephalographic responses to cortical electrical stimulation
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Modelling the simultaneous encoding/serial experience theory of the perceptual moment: a blink of meta-experience Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-03-02 Howard Bowman, William Jones, Hannah Pincham, Steve Fleming, Axel Cleeremans, Murray Smith
One way to understand a system is to explore how its behaviour degrades when it is overloaded. This approach can be applied to understanding conscious perception by presenting stimuli in rapid succession in the ‘same’ perceptual event/moment. In previous work, we have identified a striking dissociation during the perceptual moment, between what is encoded into working memory [Lag-1 sparing in the attentional
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The nature of blindsight: implications for current theories of consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Diane Derrien, Clémentine Garric, Claire Sergent, Sylvie Chokron
Blindsight regroups the different manifestations of preserved discriminatory visual capacities following the damage to the primary visual cortex. Blindsight types differentially impact objective and subjective perception, patients can report having no visual awareness whilst their behaviour suggests visual processing still occurs at some cortical level. This phenomenon hence presents a unique opportunity
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Decoding rapidly presented visual stimuli from prefrontal ensembles without report nor post-perceptual processing Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-02-24 Joachim Bellet, Marion Gay, Abhilash Dwarakanath, Bechir Jarraya, Timo van Kerkoerle, Stanislas Dehaene, Theofanis I Panagiotaropoulos
The role of the primate prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conscious perception is debated. The global neuronal workspace theory of consciousness predicts that PFC neurons should contain a detailed code of the current conscious contents. Previous research showed that PFC is indeed activated in paradigms of conscious visual perception, including no-report paradigms where no voluntary behavioral report of the
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Importance, limits and caveats of the use of "disorders of consciousness" to theorize consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-02-16 Bertrand Hermann,Aude Sangaré,Esteban Munoz-Musat,Amina Ben Salah,Pauline Perez,Mélanie Valente,Frédéric Faugeras,Vadim Axelrod,Sophie Demeret,Clémence Marois,Nadya Pyatigorskaya,Marie-Odile Habert,Aurélie Kas,Jacobo D Sitt,Benjamin Rohaut,Lionel Naccache
The clinical and fundamental exploration of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DoC) is commonly used by researchers both to test some of their key theoretical predictions and to serve as a unique source of empirical knowledge about possible dissociations between consciousness and cognitive and/or neural processes. For instance, the existence of states of vigilance free of any self-reportable
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Susceptibility to auditory hallucinations is associated with spontaneous but not directed modulation of top-down expectations for speech Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Ben Alderson-Day, Jamie Moffatt, César F Lima, Saloni Krishnan, Charles Fernyhough, Sophie K Scott, Sophie Denton, Ivy Yi Ting Leong, Alena D Oncel, Yu-Lin Wu, Zehra Gurbuz, Samuel Evans
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs)—or hearing voices—occur in clinical and non-clinical populations, but their mechanisms remain unclear. Predictive processing models of psychosis have proposed that hallucinations arise from an over-weighting of prior expectations in perception. It is unknown, however, whether this reflects (i) a sensitivity to explicit modulation of prior knowledge or (ii) a pre-existing
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Consciousness explained or described? Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-02-09 Aaron Schurger, Michael Graziano
Consciousness is an unusual phenomenon to study scientifically. It is defined as a subjective, first-person phenomenon, and science is an objective, third-person endeavor. This misalignment between the means—science—and the end—explaining consciousness—gave rise to what has become a productive workaround: the search for ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (NCCs). Science can sidestep trying to explain
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Susceptibility to auditory hallucinations is associated with spontaneous but not directed modulation of top-down expectations for speech. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2022-02-01 Ben Alderson-Day,Jamie Moffatt,César F Lima,Saloni Krishnan,Charles Fernyhough,Sophie K Scott,Sophie Denton,Ivy Yi Ting Leong,Alena D Oncel,Yu-Lin Wu,Zehra Gurbuz,Samuel Evans
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs)-or hearing voices-occur in clinical and non-clinical populations, but their mechanisms remain unclear. Predictive processing models of psychosis have proposed that hallucinations arise from an over-weighting of prior expectations in perception. It is unknown, however, whether this reflects (i) a sensitivity to explicit modulation of prior knowledge or (ii) a pre-existing
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Consciousness as a multidimensional phenomenon: implications for the assessment of disorders of consciousness Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2021-12-30 Jasmine Walter
Disorders of consciousness (DoCs) pose a significant clinical and ethical challenge because they allow for complex forms of conscious experience in patients where intentional behaviour and communication are highly limited or non-existent. There is a pressing need for brain-based assessments that can precisely and accurately characterize the conscious state of individual DoC patients. There has been
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Consciousness as a multidimensional phenomenon: implications for the assessment of disorders of consciousness. Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2021-12-30 Jasmine Walter
Disorders of consciousness (DoCs) pose a significant clinical and ethical challenge because they allow for complex forms of conscious experience in patients where intentional behaviour and communication are highly limited or non-existent. There is a pressing need for brain-based assessments that can precisely and accurately characterize the conscious state of individual DoC patients. There has been
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Representational ‘touch’ and modulatory ‘retouch’—two necessary neurobiological processes in thalamocortical interaction for conscious experience Neuroscience of Consciousness Pub Date : 2021-12-15 Talis Bachmann
Theories of consciousness using neurobiological data or being influenced by these data have been focused either on states of consciousness or contents of consciousness. These theories have occasionally used evidence from psychophysical phenomena where conscious experience is a dependent experimental variable. However, systematic catalog of many such relevant phenomena has not been offered in terms