14 papers in the library · 110 citations · publishing 2004-2026
Animal Sentience August 3, 2026 Mark Solms
The criteria for determining animal sentience proposed in the target article are sensible but they lack an explicit functional justification for the focus on pain. This commentary provides an abbreviated account of the most basic functional principles that underpin animal sentience and articulates some minimal criteria for determining its presence.
Journal of Consciousness Studies August 1, 2026 Mark Solms, St John Grimbly, Bruce Bassett et al.
Creatures that display ‘hedonic place preference behaviour’ are thought by many scientists to experience feelings, on the assumption that their attraction to pleasure-producing substances which lack nutritional value (e.g. cocaine, morphine) cannot easily be attributed to unconscious instinctual behaviour. In this paper, we discuss how a simple artificial agent that instantiates attributes of...
July 31, 2026 Mark Solms, Jonathan Shock
This chapter addresses the difficult scientific and philosophical challenge of engineering and then verifying consciousness within artificial agents. Moving beyond traditional focuses on perception and cognition, the authors argue that ‘affect’ – the raw capacity for feeling – is the fundamental form of consciousness. By defining consciousness as a subjective state rooted in an extended form of...
Brain structure & function April 28, 2026 Saúl Sal-Sarria, Mark Solms, Oliver H Turnbull
The origin of consciousness constitutes one of the most enduring challenges in contemporary science, with implications for neuroscience, philosophy, medicine and ethics. Traditional accounts have emphasized the cerebral cortex as the seat of conscious awareness, largely due to its expansion and complexity in humans. However, converging evidence suggests that the foundations of consciousness lie...
Frontiers in Psychology September 18, 2024 Mariza van Wyk, Mark Solms, Gosia Lipinska 1 citation
Traditionally, emotions in dreams have been assessed using subjective ratings by human raters (e.g., external raters or dreamers themselves). These methods have extensive support and utility in dream science, yet they have certain innate limitations due to the subjective nature of the rating methodologies. Attempting to circumvent several of these limitations, we aimed to develop a novel method...
iScience December 25, 2020 Anjali Tarun, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Virginie Sterpenich et al.
Summary: Functional dissociations in the brain observed during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep have been associated with reduced information integration and impaired consciousness that accompany increasing sleep depth. Here, we explored the dynamical properties of large-scale functional brain networks derived from transient brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Spatial...
PLoS One July 23, 2020 Joshua M. Martin, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Natália Bezerra Mota et al. 41 citations
Dream reports collected after rapid eye movement sleep (REM) awakenings are, on average, longer, more vivid, bizarre, emotional and story-like compared to those collected after non-REM. However, a comparison of the word-to-word structural organization of dream reports is lacking, and traditional measures that distinguish REM and non-REM dreaming may be confounded by report length. This problem...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience October 15, 2019 Mariza van Wyk, Mark Solms, Gosia Lipinska 37 citations
Background: Dreaming is a universal experience, yet there is considerable inter-individual variability in dream recall frequency (DRF). One dominant model, the ‘arousal-retrieval’ model, posits that intra-sleep wakefulness is required for dream traces to be encoded into long-term storage, essentially proposing that a better memory for dreams underlie increased DRF. A recent study utilizing...
Frontiers in Psychology 2018 Mark Solms
This article applies the free energy principle to the hard problem of consciousness. After clarifying some philosophical issues concerning functionalism, it identifies the elemental form of consciousness as affect and locates its physiological mechanism (an extended form of homeostasis) in the upper brainstem. This mechanism is then formalized in terms of free energy minimization (in...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences October 1, 2017 Steve Paulson, Siri Hustvedt, Mark Solms et al.
As science continues to explore the mysteries of the unconscious, two critical questions remain. First, can unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings be willfully raised to the level of the conscious self?, and, if so, would the unveiling of unconscious mechanisms lead to genuine self-knowledge or empowerment? Second, can we methodically tap into the unconscious to gear ourselves along more...
Journal of Integrative Neuroscience June 1, 2014 Mark Solms
A neuropsychoanalytical approach to the hard problem of consciousness revolves around the distinction between the subject of consciousness and objects of consciousness. In contrast to the mainstream of cognitive science, neuropsychoanalysis prioritizes the subject. The subject of consciousness is the indispensable page upon which consciousness of objects is inscribed. This has implications for...
Brain Science April 17, 2012 M. Solms, J. Panksepp
It is commonly believed that consciousness is a higher brain function. Here we consider the likelihood, based on abundant neuroevolutionary data that lower brain affective phenomenal experiences provide the “energy” for the developmental construction of higher forms of cognitive consciousness. This view is concordant with many of the theoretical formulations of Sigmund Freud. In this...
Advances in Consciousness Research October 28, 2010 Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp
We believe that conscious mental phenomena (such as feelings) are not epiphenomenal to the workings of the brain. Feelings evolved for good biological reasons; they make specific, concrete contributions to brain functioning. Notwithstanding all the philosophical complexities, therefore, the non-conscious/conscious interactions that are the focus of this book are, in our view, causal...
Dreaming December 1, 2004 Susan Malcolm‐Smith, Mark Solms 31 citations
A. Revonsuo (2000b) proposed an evolutionary theory of dreaming, stating it is a threat simulation mechanism that allowed early humans to rehearse threat perception and avoidance without biological cost. The present study aimed to establish the proportion of dreams containing physical threats to the dreamer, whether these represent realistic life-threatening events, and whether the dreamer...