Review of Philosophy and Psychology
2022
Maxwell J D Ramstead, Anil K. Seth, Casper Hesp et al.
75 citations
This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as computational phenomenology because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy...
Collabra Psychology
2021
Peter Lush, R. B. Y. Scott, Anil K. Seth et al.
35 citations
Phenomenological control is the ability to generate experiences to meet expectancies. There are stable trait differences in this ability, as shown by responses to imaginative suggestions of, for example, paralysis, amnesia, and auditory, visual, gustatory and tactile hallucinations. Phenomenological control has primarily been studied within the context of hypnosis, in which suggestions are...
Cognitive Neuroscience
2021
Anil K. Seth, Jakob Hohwy
The theories of consciousness discussed by Doerig and colleagues tend to monolithically identify consciousness with some other phenomenon, process, or mechanism. But by treating consciousness as singular explanatory target, such theories will struggle to account for the diverse properties that conscious experiences exhibit. We propose that progress in consciousness science will best be achieved...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
December 30, 2020
Jakob Hohwy, Anil K. Seth
162 citations
The search for the neural correlates of consciousness is in need of a systematic, principled foundation that can endow putative neural correlates with greater predictive and explanatory value. Here, we propose the predictive processing framework for brain function as a promising candidate for providing this systematic foundation. The proposal is motivated by that framework’s ability to address...
Nature Communications
September 25, 2020
Peter Lush, Vanessa Botan, R. B. Y. Scott et al.
136 citations
In hypnotic responding, expectancies arising from imaginative suggestion drive striking experiential changes (e.g., hallucinations) - which are experienced as involuntary - according to a normally distributed and stable trait ability (hypnotisability). Such experiences can be triggered by implicit suggestion and occur outside the hypnotic context. In large sample studies (of 156, 404 and 353...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
August 3, 2020
David J. Schwartzman, Aleš Oblak, Nicolas Rothen et al.
4 citations
preprint
Grapheme-colour synaesthesia (GCS) is defined by additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. The associative nature of GCS has motivated attempts to induce synaesthesia by means of associative learning. Two recent studies have shown that extensive associative training can generate not only behavioural (consistency and...
Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice
June 25, 2020
Zoltan Dienes, Peter Lush, Bence Pálfi et al.
42 citations
We first review recent work from our laboratory, which construes hypnotizability as an example of a more general trait of capacity for phenomenological control, which people can use to create subjective experiences in many nonhypnotic contexts where those experiences fulfill people's goals. Second, we review recent work, which construes phenomenological control as a specifically metacognitive...
Neuropsychology Review
May 12, 2020
Edward H.F. de Haan, Paul M. Corballis, Steven A. Hillyard et al.
86 citations
Recently, the discussion regarding the consequences of cutting the corpus callosum ("split-brain") has regained momentum (Corballis, Corballis, Berlucchi, & Marzi, Brain, 141(6), e46, 2018; Pinto et al., Brain, 140(5), 1231-1237, 2017a; Pinto, Lamme, & de Haan, Brain, 140(11), e68, 2017; Volz & Gazzaniga, Brain, 140(7), 2051-2060, 2017; Volz, Hillyard, Miller, & Gazzaniga, Brain, 141(3), e15,...
Neuroimage
December 17, 2019
Lionel Barnett, Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, Robin Carhart-Harris et al.
88 citations
Neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state offer a unique window onto the neural basis of conscious perception and selfhood. Despite well understood pharmacological mechanisms of action, the large-scale changes in neural dynamics induced by psychedelic compounds remain poorly understood. Using source-localised, steady-state MEG recordings, we describe changes in functional connectivity...
Trends in Neurosciences
December 10, 2019
Tim Bayne, Anil K. Seth, Marcello Massimini
146 citations
Awareness may persist in fully disconnected cortical islands.We identify both natural and artificial examples of potential islands of awareness.Detecting islands of awareness poses difficult but often addressable challenges.The possibility of islands of awareness raises important ethical and legal issues.The discovery of islands of awareness would have important implications for debates about...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
December 9, 2019
David J. Schwartzman, Daniel Bor, Nicolas Rothen et al.
7 citations
People with synaesthesia have additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. Synaesthesia therefore offers a unique window into the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying conscious perception. A long-standing question in synaesthesia research is whether it is possible to artificially induce non-synaesthetic individuals to have...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
January 4, 2019
David J. Schwartzman, Michael Schartner, Benjamin B. Ador et al.
31 citations
preprint
Abstract What are the global neuronal signatures of altered states of consciousness (ASC)? Recently, increases in neural signal diversity, compared to those found in wakeful rest, have been reported during psychedelic states. Neural signal diversity has previously been identified as a robust signature of the state of consciousness, showing lower scores during sleep or anaesthesia compared to...
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
December 25, 2018
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Anil K. Seth, Adam B. Barrett
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a prominent theory of consciousness that has at its centre measures that quantify the extent to which a system generates more information than the sum of its parts. While several candidate measures of integrated information (" Φ ") now exist, little is known about how they compare, especially in terms of their behaviour on non-trivial network models. In...
arXiv Preprint Archive
June 25, 2018
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Anil K. Seth, Adam B. Barrett
Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is a prominent theory of consciousness that has at its centre measures that quantify the extent to which a system generates more information than the sum of its parts. While several candidate measures of integrated information (`$Φ$') now exist, little is known about how they compare, especially in terms of their behaviour on non-trivial network models. In...
Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
February 27, 2018
Geoff Davies, Charlotte L. Rae, Sarah N. Garfinkel et al.
23 citations
INTRODUCTION: Metacognition, or "thinking about thinking", is a higher-order thought process that allows for the evaluation of perceptual processes for accuracy. Metacognitive accuracy is associated with the grey matter volume (GMV) in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), an area also impacted in schizophrenia. The present study set out to investigate whether deficits in metacognitive accuracy are...
Neuroimage
February 15, 2018
Michał Bola, Adam B. Barrett, Andrea Pigorini et al.
Loss of consciousness can result from a wide range of causes, including natural sleep and pharmacologically induced anesthesia. Important insights might thus come from identifying neuronal mechanisms of loss and re-emergence of consciousness independent of a specific manipulation. Therefore, to seek neuronal signatures of loss of consciousness common to sleep and anesthesia we analyzed...
Brain and neuroscience advances
2018
Anil K. Seth
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...
Scientific Reports
November 16, 2017
Keisuke Suzuki, Warrick Roseboom, David J. Schwartzman et al.
111 citations
Altered states of consciousness, such as psychotic or pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, provide a unique opportunity to examine the mechanisms underlying conscious perception. However, the phenomenological properties of these states are difficult to isolate experimentally from other, more general physiological and cognitive effects of psychoactive substances or psychopathological...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
November 3, 2017
Keisuke Suzuki, Warrick Roseboom, David J. Schwartzman et al.
2 citations
preprint
Altered states of consciousness, such as psychotic or pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, provide a unique opportunity to examine the mechanisms underlying conscious perception. However, the phenomenological properties of these states are difficult to isolate experimentally from other, more general physiological and cognitive effects of psychoactive substances or psychopathological...
Scientific Reports
April 19, 2017
Michael Schartner, Robin Carhart-Harris, Adam B. Barrett et al.
450 citations
Abstract What is the level of consciousness of the psychedelic state? Empirically, measures of neural signal diversity such as entropy and Lempel-Ziv (LZ) complexity score higher for wakeful rest than for states with lower conscious level like propofol-induced anesthesia. Here we compute these measures for spontaneous magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals from humans during altered states of...
Journal of Experimental Psychology General
January 30, 2017
Yair Pinto, Annelinde R. E. Vandenbroucke, Marte Otten et al.
23 citations
Is conscious visual perception limited to the locations that a person attends? The remarkable phenomenon of change blindness, which shows that people miss nearly all unattended changes in a visual scene, suggests the answer is yes. However, change blindness is found after visual interference (a mask or a new scene), so that subjects have to rely on working memory (WM), which has limited...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 27, 2017
Michael Schartner, Andrea Pigorini, Steve A. Gibbs et al.
158 citations
Key to understanding the neuronal basis of consciousness is the characterization of the neural signatures of changes in level of consciousness during sleep. Here we analysed three measures of dynamical complexity on spontaneous depth electrode recordings from 10 epilepsy patients during wakeful rest (WR) and different stages of sleep: (i) Lempel-Ziv complexity, which is derived from how...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
October 11, 2016
Anil K. Seth, Karl Friston
936 citations
We review a recent shift in conceptions of interoception and its relationship to hierarchical inference in the brain. The notion of interoceptive inference means that bodily states are regulated by autonomic reflexes that are enslaved by descending predictions from deep generative models of our internal and external milieu. This re-conceptualization illuminates several issues in cognitive and...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
April 15, 2016
Maxine T. Sherman, Ryota Kanai, Anil K. Seth et al.
134 citations
Prior expectations have a powerful influence on perception, biasing both decision and confidence. However, how this occurs at the neural level remains unclear. It has been suggested that spontaneous alpha-band neural oscillations represent rhythms of the perceptual system that periodically modulate perceptual judgments. We hypothesized that these oscillations instantiate the effects of...
Animal Sentience
2016
Anil K. Seth
49 citations
Do fish consciously feel pain? Addressing this question, Key (2016) asks whether the neural mechanisms underlying conscious pain reports in humans can be identified in fish. This strategy fails in three ways. First, non-mammalian consciousness — if it exists — may depend on different mechanisms. Second, accumulating neurophysiological and behavioural evidence, evolutionary considerations, and...