Consciousness, at its simplest, represents awareness of self in relation to the outside world. This can be divided further into the reasoning and rationality of Access consciousness (A-C) versus the experiential and 'what it's like' of Phenomenal consciousness (P-C). A-C is directly measurable, using standard tests of cognition and memory. However, owing to the subjective nature of P-C, its...
Delirium has conventionally been considered a disorder of consciousness. Alertness and arousal are used as surrogates in clinical practice but are insufficient for the purposes of a more dimensional assessment of consciousness. We present a process of development and validation of candidate measures of phenomenal consciousness that could be applied to the diagnosis of delirium. First, a...