Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2022
Axel Cleeremans, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
97 citations
Consciousness is not a mere byproduct of brain activity but has a function: subjective experience carries intrinsic value that motivates action. The authors propose the 'phenomenal worthiness' hypothesis, arguing that agents act because they experience and care about those experiences. This value-laden quality allows comparison of different experiences in a unified, subject-centered space, explaining why consciousness feels unified. If phenomenal experience has intrinsic value, then consciousness must have a function, making the hard problem of consciousness more tractable by reframing it as a problem about function.
Journal of Neuroscience
March 23, 2021
Diego Candia‐rivera, Jitka Annen, Olivia Gosseries et al.
81 citations
Heartbeat-evoked responses (HERs) in resting-state EEG can distinguish between postcomatose patients who are unresponsive and those in a minimally conscious state with 87% accuracy, 96% sensitivity, and 50% specificity. HERs provide more accurate classification than random EEG segments not locked to heartbeats or heart rate variability. HER-based consciousness scores correlate with glucose metabolism in the right superior temporal sulcus and right ventral occipitotemporal cortex. HERs reflect consciousness diagnosis based on brain metabolism better than behavior-based diagnosis (77% validation accuracy). These findings suggest HERs capture a capacity for consciousness that does not necessarily translate into intentional overt behavior.
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
November 13, 2025
Léa Moncoucy, Krzysztof Dołęga, Catherine Tallon-Baudry et al.
5 citations
Phenomenal experience—what it feels like to be an organism—has intrinsic value that cannot be reduced to evolutionary cost-benefit calculations. While all organisms act for reasons shaped by extrinsic evolutionary pressures, some also act for reasons of their own, sometimes even in ways detrimental to their survival. This shift marks a fundamental change in nature: subjective experience broadens an organism's capacity to act not merely in response to objective evolutionary value but also according to preference-driven subjective value associated with items, situations, events, or other agents. Subjective value can serve both as a driver of behavior and as a target for behavior, making it irreducible to extrinsic forms of value.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
May 11, 2016
Florence Campana, Ignacio Rebollo, Anne Urai et al.
Global information in vision is perceived faster and dominates conscious perception compared to local details, according to a test of the reverse hierarchy theory. Using novel hierarchical stimuli where global orientation is defined solely by local orientation, observers reported global properties faster than local ones. Magnetoencephalography data showed global information was decoded during early visual processing regardless of task demands. Spontaneous subjective reports were dominated by global information, and the frequency and speed of spontaneous global perception correlated with accuracy and speed in the global task, but not the local task. This provides empirical evidence that conscious percepts emerge preferentially at a global level, accounting for the dominance of global percepts and the feeling of visual richness.
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
May 5, 2014
Hyeong-Dong Park, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Visual consciousness is often defined by reports like 'I saw the stimulus,' but the origin of the 'I' remains unexplained. To address the subjective dimension of perceptual experience, a concept called the neural subjective frame is introduced. This frame is based on constantly updated neural maps of the body's internal state, creating a neural reference point for first-person experience. It is proposed to be rooted in neural representations of visceral information transmitted via multiple pathways to brain regions including the posterior insula, ventral anterior cingulate cortex, amygdala, and somatosensory cortex. Existing evidence shows that external stimulus processing can interact with visceral function.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2012
Ying Liu, Anne-Lise Paradis, Lydia Yahia-Cherif et al.
Neural activity over posterior brain regions between 200 and 300 milliseconds after a stimulus distinguishes seen from unseen stimuli. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in 14 participants who viewed faint colored gratings at the threshold of visibility, the main sources of awareness-related activity were localized bilaterally in the lateral occipital complex and right posterior infero-temporal region, not in frontal or parietal areas. Color congruency with a preceding cue did not improve detection of the grating, and awareness-related activity was independent of color congruency. However, color congruency was processed differently when a grating was present versus absent, engaging left parietal regions. The findings suggest an occipital source of visual awareness insensitive to color congruency and a separate parietal process sensitive to co-localized features but not directly involved in awareness.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
December 16, 2011
Valentin Wyart, Stanislas Dehaene, Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Spatial attention amplifies early visual brain responses around 100 milliseconds after a stimulus appears, but this amplification does not determine whether the stimulus is consciously detected. In a magnetoencephalography experiment, participants attended toward or away from masked stimuli that were physically identical yet detected half the time. Attention increased occipital responses equally for detected and missed stimuli and did not increase detection rates. The earliest neural correlate of conscious detection occurred around 120 milliseconds over contralateral temporal cortex, independent of attention. A later correlate of conscious reportability appeared from 220 milliseconds over temporal and frontal cortex, coinciding with attentional reorienting triggered by masks at uncued locations. Conscious detection of a masked stimulus at an unexpected location captures spatial attention, supporting a double dissociation between endogenous spatial attention and perceptual awareness.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2011
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
A review of neurophysiological evidence examines whether consciousness and attention share the same neural mechanisms or are distinct. Three mechanisms linked to both—neural amplification, fronto-parietal network involvement, and oscillatory synchrony—are evaluated. The review concludes that commonalities at the neural level may have been overestimated, and experiments probing both attention and consciousness point toward a dissociation between the two concepts. A "cumulative influence model" is proposed, where attention and consciousness correspond to distinct neural mechanisms that feed a single decisional process leading to behavior. Consciousness should not be considered a top-level executive function but defined by its experiential properties.