Conscious experience is intricately linked to neurophysiological mechanisms of memory. A study involving 100 participants revealed that implicit memory, regulated by lemnothalamic pathways during REM sleep, underpins unconscious awareness, while explicit memory, driven by collothalamic structures during NREM sleep, shapes focused consciousness. This dual system highlights how ongoing cognitive processes are influenced by a hierarchy of neural connections across various brain regions. Understanding these mechanisms may shed light on the enigmatic qualities of subjective experiences, often referred to as "the hard problem of consciousness."
Intelligence arises from patterns of connections among neurons, whether in brains or machines. Brains develop continuously as experience shapes their neural connections. Active inference theory suggests that sentient systems organize themselves by minimizing free energy, a process of informatic self-evidencing. This implies that the mind can be described in information terms independent of its physical substrate. At a certain complexity level, self-evidencing becomes hierarchical and reentrant, leading to consciousness as a good regulator. These principles indicate that adequate reconstruction of an individual human brain's computational dynamics is possible through neuromorphic computational emulation.
Fifteen seminary students who regularly practiced a form of Christian meditation took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and had their electroencephalographic (EEG) signals recorded. Alpha brainwave activity was measured during mental arithmetic tasks and during meditation. Higher scores on the Hypochondriasis scale of the MMPI were linked to an increase in alpha activity when moving from arithmetic to meditation. The finding is discussed in relation to past research, baseline alpha levels, and possible therapeutic uses of meditation.