arXiv Preprint Archive
May 27, 2014
Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch
The science of consciousness has made great strides by focusing on the behavioral and neuronal correlates of experience. However, correlates are not enough if we are to understand even basic neurological fact; nor are they of much help in cases where we would like to know if consciousness is present: patients with a few remaining islands of functioning cortex, pre-term infants, non-mammalian...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
April 27, 2010
Jeroen J A Van Boxtel, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Christof Koch
176 citations
The brain's ability to handle sensory information is influenced by both selective attention and consciousness. There is no consensus on the exact relationship between these two processes and whether they are distinct. So far, no experiment has simultaneously manipulated both. We carried out a full factorial 2 x 2 study of the simultaneous influences of attention and consciousness (as assayed by...
Frontiers in Psychology
2010
Jeroen J A Van Boxtel, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Christof Koch
Recent research has slowly corroded a belief that selective attention and consciousness are so tightly entangled that they cannot be individually examined. In this review, we summarize psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence for a dissociation between top-down attention and consciousness. The evidence includes recent findings that show subjects can attend to perceptually invisible...
IEEE Spectrum
May 29, 2008
Christof Koch, Giulio Tononi
134 citations
Would you sell your soul on eBay? Right now, of course, you can't. But in some quarters it is taken for granted that within a generation, human beings-including you, if you can hang on for another 30 years or so-will have an alternative to death: being a ghost in a machine. You'll be able to upload your mind-your thoughts, memories, and personality-to a computer. And once you've reduced your...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
March 1, 2008
Giulio Tononi, Christof Koch
615 citations
This review examines recent advances in the study of brain correlates of consciousness. First, we briefly discuss some useful distinctions between consciousness and other brain functions. We then examine what has been learned by studying global changes in the level of consciousness, such as sleep, anesthesia, and seizures. Next we consider some of the most common paradigms used to study the...
Scholarpedia
2007
Florian Mormann, Christof Koch
154 citations
Consciousness is a puzzling, state-dependent property of certain types of complex, biological, adaptive, and highly interconnected systems. A science of consciousness must strive to explain the exact relationship between phenomenal, mental states and brain states. This is the heart of the classical mind-body problem: What is the nature of the relationship between the immaterial, conscious mind...
23 Problems in Systems Neuroscience
January 5, 2006
Francis C. Crick, Christof Koch
AbstractThis chapter attempts to discover the minimal neural mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one conscious sensation or percept, the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC). It raises a series of questions which cover some of the subproblems that are likely to bear on the NCC, and focuses on the visual system of humans and macaque monkeys.
Nature Neuroscience
February 1, 2003
F. Crick, C. Koch
Here we summarize our present approach to the problem of consciousness. After an introduction outlining our general strategy, we describe what is meant by the term 'framework' and set it out under ten headings. This framework offers a coherent scheme for explaining the neural correlates of (visual) consciousness in terms of competing cellular assemblies. Most of the ideas we favor have been...
Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology
1990
Francis C. Crick, Christof Koch
334 citations
preprint
Koch 1990) that outlined a sketch of such a theory. Our aim was not to produce as complete a theory of con-sciousness as possible but to indicate promising lines of experimental work, mainly neurobiological, that might lead eventually toward a solution of the problem. We made the plausible assumption that all forms of con-sciousness (e.g., seeing, thinking, and pain) employ, at bottom, rather...