Consciousness: today

Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Science, 1994

Prolegomena to Empirical Psychology and Rational Psychology. The former book was originally published in 1732 and the latter in 1734. Wolff's contribution was to relate the method of studying psychology to that of physics. He sought to establish laws of sensation, memory, emotion, understanding, and behavior. Johann Friederich Herbart further developed Wolff's measuring methods, and Wilhelm Wundt, who considered Wolff "the most influential psychological systematist among moderns," used Wolff's ideas to develop his psychophysics.

Behavioural Neurology, 2011

Consciousness is a state so essentially entwined with human experience, yet so difficult to conceptually define and measure. In this article, we explore how a bidimensional model of consciousness involving both level of arousal and subjective awareness of the contents of consciousness can be used to differentiate a range of healthy and altered conscious states. These include the different sleep stages of healthy individuals and the altered states of consciousness associated with neurological conditions such as epilepsy, vegetative state and coma. In particular, we discuss how arousal and awareness are positively correlated in normal physiological states with the exception of REM sleep, while a disturbance in this relationship is characteristic of vegetative state, minimally conscious state, complex partial seizures and sleepwalking.

Journal of Psychophysiology, 2010

The study of visual processing and abnormalities due to lesions of cortical structures sheds light on visual awareness/consciousness and may help us to better understand consciousness. We report on clinical observations and psychophysical testing of achromatopsia/prosopagnosia, visual agnosia, and blindsight. Achromatopsia and prosopagnosia reveal that visual cortices have functionally specialized processing systems for color, face perception, and their awareness, and that furthermore these systems operate independently. Dysfunction is limited to some aspects of visual perception; someone with achromatopsia, although not conscious of color, is aware of the objects' form, motion, and their relationship with sound and other sensory percepts. Perceptual awareness is modular, with neuronal correlates represented by multiple separate specialized structures or modules. Visual agnosia shows that awareness of a complete visual percept is absent, though the subject is aware of single visual features such as edges, motion, etc., an indication that visual agnosia is a disruption of the binding process that unifies all information into a whole percept. Blindsight is characterized by the subject's ability to localize a visual target while denying actually seeing the target. Blindsight is mediated by residual islands of the visual cortex, which suggests that sensory modules responsible for awareness can function only when structurally intact. We conclude (1) that perceptual awareness (consciousness?) is modular, and (2) that perceptual integration is also modular, which suggests that integration among distinct cortical regions is a parallel process with multiple communication pathways. Any hypothesis about consciousness must include these observations about the presence of multiple parallel, but spatially and temporally different, mechanisms.

Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 2009

Brain and Neuroscience Advances, 2018

The mind and brain sciences began with consciousness as a central concern. But for much of the 20th century, ideological and methodological concerns relegated its empirical study to the margins. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and momentum befitting its status as the primary feature of our mental lives. Nowadays, consciousness science encompasses a rich interdisciplinary mixture drawing together philosophical, theoretical, computational, experimental, and clinical perspectives, with neuroscience its central discipline. Researchers have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying global states of consciousness, distinctions between conscious and unconscious perception, and self-consciousness. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first-person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third-person objective) descriptions of (embodied and embedded) neuronal mechanisms. Such progress will he...

The dual-aspect-dual-mode framework of consciousness, based on neuroscience, consists of four components: (1) dual-aspect primal entities; (2) neural-Darwinism: co-evolution and co-development of subjective experiences (SEs) and associated neural-nets from the mental aspect (that carries the SEs/proto-experiences (PEs) in superposed and unexpressed form) and the material aspect (mass, charge, spin and spacetime) of fundamental entities (elementary particles), respectively and cotuning via sensorimotor interaction; (3) matching and selection processes: interaction of two modes, namely, (a) the non-tilde mode that is the material and mental aspect of cognition (memory and attention) related feedback signals in a neural-network, which is the cognitive nearest past approaching towards present; and (b) the tilde mode that is the material and mental aspect of the feed forward signals due to external environmental input and internal endogenous input, which is the nearest future approaching towards present and is a entropy-reversed representation of non-tilde mode; and (4) the necessary ingredients of SEs (such as wakefulness, attention, re-entry, working memory, stimulus at or above threshold level, and neural-net PEs). This framework leads to structural and functional coherence between the mind and the brain, bridges the explanatory gap (the gap between SEs and their neural-correlates), and leads to our mundane subjective experiences. This dual-aspect-dual-mode

Studia Humana, 2015

Scientific, objective approach to consciousness has allowed to obtain some experimental data concerning brain activity, ignoring, however, the longstanding philosophical tradition. Spectacular development of neuroscience which has been observed recently made this dissonance particularly noticeable. The paper addresses the main problems of discrepancy between neurobiological research and philosophical perspective. Current opinions concerning neural correlates and models of consciousness are discussed, as well as the problems of working memory, attention, self, and disorders of consciousness. A new neurobiological approach to describe brain function in terms of brain connectivity (so-called connectome) is also presented. Finally, the need to introduce at least some aspects of philosophical approach directly into neurobiological research of consciousness is postulated.

Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 1997

The nature of consciousness has become a focus of lively debate among psychologists, physiologists, and philosophers.1-13 We take this opportunity to review the reasons for the current surge of interest and to examine the prospects for a new "science of consciousness". Because self consciousness has sometimes been regarded as a precondition for consciousness we briefly consider their relation, in the light of recent findings. Definitions Consciousness is a multifaceted concept. The word originates from the Latin conscio, formed by the coalescence of cum (with) and scio (to know).'4 The Latin root was used to