DC. Dennett (2020,personal communication) asked: 'How do we go from doing things for reasons to having reasons for doing things?'. This question targets a fundamental shift in nature: while all organisms act in the way they do for reasons that are shaped by extrinsic evolutionary cost functions, some also act for reasons of their own, even engaging in behaviour that may be detrimental to their...
Conscious experience is defined by its quality (what it feels like), but also by its subjectivity: that it feels like something to a subject. Explaining the emergence of a unified first-person perspective in the subject of experience is key to a neuroscientific understanding of subjective experience. Yet, while subjectivity has been debated by philosophers, it has often been overlooked by...
Subjective experiences often feel rich, yet are most often quantified with simple metrics, such as a few levels on a predefined scale. What are the dimensions and topological organization of subjective experience? How do they relate to behavioral output? And how do they map onto the classical cognitive domains?
'Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?' In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience-'What it feels like'-is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value...
Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us? In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that the core function of consciousness is precisely to enable subject-level experience. “What it feels like” is...
The neural monitoring of visceral inputs might play a role in first-person perspective (i.e., the unified viewpoint of subjective experience). In healthy participants, how the brain responds to heartbeats, measured as the heartbeat-evoked response (HER), correlates with perceptual, bodily, and self-consciousness. Here we show that HERs in resting-state EEG data distinguishes between...
Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
Recent research has shown that heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), brain activity in response to heartbeats, are a useful neural measure for investigating the functional role of brain-body interactions in cognitive processes including self-consciousness. In 2 experiments, using intracranial electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated (1) the neural sources of HEPs, (2) the underlying...
The reverse hierarchy theory (Hochstein and Ahissar, 2002) makes strong, but so far untested, predictions on conscious vision. In this theory, local details encoded in lower-order visual areas are unconsciously processed before being automatically and rapidly combined into global information in higher-order visual areas, where conscious percepts emerge. Contingent on current goals, local...
The report 'I saw the stimulus' operationally defines visual consciousness, but where does the 'I' come from? To account for the subjective dimension of perceptual experience, we introduce the concept of the neural subjective frame. The neural subjective frame would be based on the constantly updated neural maps of the internal state of the body and constitute a neural referential from which...
Subjective experience often accompanies perception and cognition. This elusive feeling is difficult to characterize, both theoretically and experimentally. Perceptual subjective experience is at the heart of a theoretical debate in consciousness research: does it correspond to a genuine psychological and biological process independent from cognitive abilities, or is it a cognitive illusion, a...
There is converging evidence that electrophysiological responses over posterior cortical regions in the 200-300 ms range distinguish between physically identical stimuli that reach consciousness or remain unseen. Here, we attempt at determining the sources of this awareness-related activity using magneto-encephalographic (MEG). Fourteen subjects were presented with faint colored gratings at...
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SPATIAL ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUS ACCESS HAS OFTEN BEEN PICTURED AS A SINGLE CAUSAL LINK: spatial attention would provide conscious access to weak stimuli by increasing their effective contrast during early visual processing. To test this hypothesis, we assessed whether the early attentional amplification of visual responses, around 100 ms following stimulus onset, had a...
Consciousness, as described in the experimental literature, is a multi-faceted phenomenon, that impinges on other well-studied concepts such as attention and control. Do consciousness and attention refer to different aspects of the same core phenomenon, or do they correspond to distinct functions? One possibility to address this question is to examine the neural mechanisms underlying...