The brain's resting-state interactions show a general rightward and top-down bias in excitatory connections among structures from different evolutionary layers (archicortex, paleocortex, neocortex), based on fMRI data from 25 healthy subjects. The right hippocampus uniquely exerts bottom-up excitatory influence reaching the frontopolar cortex, while the right ventrolateral cortex interacts with most nodes across evolutionary subdivisions. These findings suggest multiple levels of cognitive-affective organization in the human brain with profound lateralization.
A computational model of consciousness is explored by designing a software agent that simulates speech understanding and irony. The agent operates with scripts—productions or inferences—to process texts, extract semantic representations, and select reactions. It can simulate irony by replacing direct aggressive behavior with a positive sarcastic utterance, balancing between available scripts. This scheme may serve as a minimal architecture of consciousness, where the agent distinguishes its own representations from those of other agents through a two-stage processing: activating scripts and differentiating them by activation levels. The agent demonstrates features considered essential for conscious agents in philosophy and cognitive psychology, such as simulating imaginary situations and actions of itself and others.