Neuron
June 17, 2026
Vincent Taschereau-Dumouchel, Jun Seo Hwang, Hakwan Lau et al.
Rising media attention regarding consciousness in animals, fetuses, organoids, and AI has led to some rather strong statements. Most of these claims are based on "markers" of consciousness that track the general capacity for information processing rather than subjective experience per se. Accordingly, their relevance for theory arbitration may actually be limited.
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Joseph E LeDoux
The word ‘consciousness’ is often used as if it is a single thing, and as if everyone knows, in a general sense, what that thing is. The very notion of a theory of consciousness implies that someday this thing will be accounted for. But suppose that multiple kinds of consciousness exist. If so, an adequate theory of consciousness would have to be multifaceted rather than unitary. And,...
Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences
June 17, 2024
Cody A Cushing, Ha-Kwan Lau, Stefan G Hofmann et al.
When patients seek professional help for mental disorders, they often do so because of troubling subjective affective experiences. While these subjective states are at the center of the patient's symptomatology, scientific tools for studying them and their cognitive antecedents are limited. Here, we explore the use of concepts and analytic tools from the science of consciousness, a field of...
PsyArXiv
September 16, 2023
Stephen M Fleming, Chris Frith, Mel Goodale et al.
preprint
The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are writing as researchers with some relevant expertise to express our concerns.
Current Biology
August 1, 2023
Joseph E LeDoux, Jonathan Birch, Kristin Andrews et al.
There is growing interest in the relationship been AI and consciousness. Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch thought it would be a good moment to put some of the big questions in this area to some leading experts. The challenge of addressing the questions they raised was taken up by Kristin Andrews, Nicky Clayton, Nathaniel Daw, Chris Frith, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters, Susan Schneider, Anil Seth,...
PNAS Nexus
January 23, 2023
Cody A Cushing, Alexei J Dawes, Stefan G Hofmann et al.
The mechanisms underlying the subjective experiences of mental disorders remain poorly understood. This is partly due to long-standing over-emphasis on behavioral and physiological symptoms and a de-emphasis of the patient's subjective experiences when searching for treatments. Here, we provide a new perspective on the subjective experience of mental disorders based on findings in neuroscience...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
March 13, 2020
Joseph E LeDoux, Matthias Michel, Hakwan Lau
Consciousness is currently a thriving area of research in psychology and neuroscience. While this is often attributed to events that took place in the early 1990s, consciousness studies today are a continuation of research that started in the late 19th century and that continued throughout the 20th century. From the beginning, the effort built on studies of animals to reveal basic principles of...
Cognitive Neuropsychology
2020
Richard Brown, Joseph E LeDoux
26 citations
In the interesting and thought-provoking article Grazziano and colleagues argue for their Attention Schema Theory (AST) of consciousness. They present AST as a unification of Global Workspace Theory (GWT), Illusionism, and the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory. We argue it is a mistake to equate 'subjective experience,' ad related terms, with dualism. They simply denote experience. Also, as...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
September 1, 2019
Richard Brown, Hakwan Lau, Joseph E LeDoux
The higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness has often been misunderstood by critics. Here, we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views, such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models (e.g., first-order local recurrency theories). For example, HOT has been criticized for overintellectualizing consciousness. We show that, while...
Nature Human Behaviour
February 1, 2019
M. Michel, Diane M Beck, Ned Block et al.
Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
PsyArXiv
January 7, 2019
Richard Brown, Hakwan Lau, Joseph E LeDoux
preprint
Critics have often misunderstood the higher-order theory (HOT) of consciousness. Here we clarify its position on several issues, and distinguish it from other views such as the global workspace theory (GWT) and early sensory models, such as first-order local recurrency theory. The criticism that HOT overintellectualizes conscious experience is inaccurate because in reality the theory assumes...
Cerebrum
2018
Joseph E LeDoux, Richard Brown, D. Pine et al.
Editor’s Note The study of subjective experience represents a significant challenge to cognitive scientists, but one that is beginning to be increasingly addressed. Subjectivity renders experience less amenable to traditional objective scientific measurements than other subject matter. Our authors believe that when seeking to understand the mind, subjectivity must ultimately be investigated and...
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences
November 16, 2017
Joseph E LeDoux, Stefan G Hofmann
We argue that subjective emotional experience, the feeling, is the essence of an emotion, and that objective manifestations in behavior and in body or brain physiology are, at best, indirect indicators of these inner experiences. As a result, the most direct way to assess conscious emotional feelings is through verbal self-report. This creates a methodological barrier to studies of conscious...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
February 15, 2017
Joseph E LeDoux, Richard Brown
Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programmed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system...