Consciousness and Cognition
February 23, 2011
Lawrence M Ward
I propose that primary conscious awareness arises from synchronized activity in dendrites of neurons in dorsal thalamic nuclei, mediated particularly by inhibitory interactions with thalamic reticular neurons. In support, I offer four evidential pillars: (1) consciousness is restricted to the results of cortical computations; (2) thalamus is the common locus of action of brain injury in...
Consciousness and Cognition
February 16, 2011
Leanne K. Wilkins, Todd A. Girard, J. Allan Cheyne
57 citations
Investigation of "out-of-body experiences" (OBEs) has implications for understanding both normal bodily-self integration and its vulnerabilities. Beyond reported associations between OBEs and specific brain regions, however, there have been few investigations of neurochemical systems relevant to OBEs. Ketamine, a drug used recreationally to achieve dissociative experiences, provides a...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 13, 2010
Ursula Voss, Inka Tuin, Karin Schermelleh-Engel et al.
Models of dream analysis either assume a continuum of waking and dreaming or the existence of two dissociated realities. Both approaches rely on different methodology. Whereas continuity models are based on content analysis, discontinuity models use a structural approach. In our study, we applied both methods to test specific hypotheses about continuity or discontinuity. We contrasted dream...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Vince Polito, Robyn Langdon, Jac Brown
31 citations
Much attention has been paid recently to the role of anomalous experiences in the aetiology of certain types of psychopathology, e.g. in the formation of delusions. We examine, instead, the top-down influence of pre-existing beliefs and affective factors in shaping an individual's characterisation of anomalous sensory experiences. Specifically we investigated the effects of paranormal beliefs...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Zoran Josipovic
The great variety of meditation techniques found in different contemplative traditions presents a challenge when attempting to create taxonomies based on the constructs of contemporary cognitive sciences. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Travis and Shear add 'automatic self-transcending' to the previously proposed categories of 'focused attention' and 'open monitoring', and...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2010
Fred Travis, Jonathan Shear
This paper proposes a third meditation-category--automatic self-transcending--to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automatic self-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2010
Charles Lenay, Pierre Steiner
This paper tackles the problem of the nature of the space of perception. Based both on philosophical arguments and on results obtained from original experimental situations, it attempts to show how space is constituted concretely, before any distinction between the "inner" and the "outer" can be made. It thus sheds light on the presuppositions of the well-known debate between internalism and...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2010
Kristian Sandberg, Bert Timmermans, Morten Overgaard et al.
What is the best way of assessing the extent to which people are aware of a stimulus? Here, using a masked visual identification task, we compared three measures of subjective awareness: The Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS), through which participants are asked to rate the clarity of their visual experience; confidence ratings (CR), through which participants express their confidence in their...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2010
Andrew B. Newberg, Nancy Wintering, Mark R. Waldman et al.
We have studied a number of long-term meditators in previous studies. The purpose of this study was to determine if there are differences in baseline brain function of experienced meditators compared to non-meditators. All subjects were recruited as part of an ongoing study of different meditation practices. We evaluated 12 advanced meditators and 14 non-meditators with cerebral blood flow...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2010
Félix-Antoine Lusignan, Roger Godbout, Marie-Josée Dubuc et al.
This study examined the laboratory dream content reported by 14 patients with schizophrenia and 15 controls, with a focus on reports obtained from NonREM sleep. Both the controls' and patients' frequency of dream recall following awakenings from NonREM and REM sleep were similar to values reported for healthy participants. Patients' NonREM sleep narratives were shorter than those from controls....
Consciousness and Cognition
November 13, 2010
Jingsheng Zhou, Xiaolin Liu, Weiqun Song et al.
Recent theoretical advances describing consciousness from information and integration have highlighted the unique role of the thalamocortical system in leading to integrated information and thus, consciousness. Here, we examined the differential distributions of specific and nonspecific thalamocortical functional connections using resting-state fMRI in a group of healthy subjects and...
Consciousness and Cognition
October 8, 2010
How to integrate dreaming into a general theory of consciousness--a critical review of existing positions and suggestions for future research.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 2010
Doreen Jirak, Mareike M Menz, Giovanni Buccino et al.
The new concept of embodied cognition theories has been enthusiastically studied by the cognitive sciences, by as well as such disparate disciplines as philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, and robotics. Embodiment theory provides the framework for ongoing discussions on the linkage between "low" cognitive processes as perception and "high" cognition as language processing and comprehension,...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 2010
Lukas Heydrich, Sebastian Dieguez, Thomas Grunwald et al.
Neurological disorders of body representation have for a long time suggested the importance of multisensory processing of bodily signals for self-consciousness. One such group of disorders--illusory own body perceptions affecting the entire body--has been proposed to be especially relevant in this respect, based on neurological data as well as philosophical considerations. This has recently...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2010
Antonino Raffone, Martina Pantani
51 citations
Both the global workspace theory and Block's distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, are central in the current debates about consciousness and the neural correlates of consciousness. In this article, a unifying global workspace model for phenomenal and access consciousness is proposed. In the model, recurrent neural interactions take place in distinct yet interacting access...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 2010
Morten Overgaard, Bert Timmermans, Kristian Sandberg et al.
Dienes and Seth (2010) conclude that confidence ratings and post-decision wagering are two comparable and recommendable measures of conscious experience. In a recently submitted paper, we have however found that both methods are problematic and seem less suited to measure consciousness than a direct introspective measure. Here, we discuss the methodology and conclusions put forward by Dienes...
Consciousness and Cognition
May 15, 2010
Marco Zanasi, Fabrizio Calisti, Giorgio Di Lorenzo et al.
This work evaluated the structure of dreams in people affected by schizophrenia. The verbal reports of 123 schizophrenic patients were compared with 123 dream reports from a control group. In accordance with the Jungian conceptualization of, dreams as texts, dream reports were assessed using textual analysis processing techniques. Significant differences were found in textual parameters,...
Consciousness and Cognition
April 28, 2010
Holley S Hodgins, Kathryn C Adair
Visual attentional processing was examined in adult meditators and non-meditators on behavioral measures of change blindness, concentration, perspective-shifting, selective attention, and sustained inattentional blindness. Results showed that meditators (1) noticed more changes in flickering scenes and noticed them more quickly, (2) counted more accurately in a challenging concentration task,...
Consciousness and Cognition
April 3, 2010
Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: evidence of brief mental training.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 2010
David Gamez
This paper describes how Tononi's information integration theory of consciousness was used to make detailed predictions about the distribution of phenomenal states in a spiking neural network. This network had approximately 18,000 neurons and 700,000 connections and it used models of emotion and imagination to control the eye movements of a virtual robot and avoid 'negative' stimuli. The first...
Consciousness and Cognition
January 25, 2010
Chien-Ming Yang, Huei-Ya Han, Ming-Hsin Yang et al.
Sleep onset is associated with marked changes in behavioral, physiological, and subjective phenomena. In daily life though subjective experience is the main criterion in terms of which we identify it. But very few studies have focused on these experiences. This study seeks to identify the subjective variables that reflect sleep onset. Twenty young subjects took an afternoon nap in the...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2009
John Beeckmans
1 citation
It has been suggested (Block, 2007) that the core neural bases for visual phenomenal consciousness and for access consciousness are located in anatomically separate regions. If this is correct, and if, as Block suggests, the core neural substrate of visual phenomenality is located early in the visual cortex where detailed chromatic information is available, then it would be reasonable to infer...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 1, 2009
Jamie Ward, Peter Meijer
In this report, the phenomenology of two blind users of a sensory substitution device - "The vOICe" - that converts visual images to auditory signals is described. The users both report detailed visual phenomenology that developed within months of immersive use and has continued to evolve over a period of years. This visual phenomenology, although triggered through use of The vOICe, is likely...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2009
François Vialatte, Hovagim Bakardjian, Rajkishore Prasad et al.
Here we report that a specific form of yoga can generate controlled high-frequency gamma waves. For the first time, paroxysmal gamma waves (PGW) were observed in eight subjects practicing a yoga technique of breathing control called Bhramari Pranayama (BhPr). To obtain new insights into the nature of the EEG during BhPr, we analyzed EEG signals using time-frequency representations (TFR),...
Consciousness and Cognition
December 2009
Susan Pockett, Mark D Holmes
Power density spectra and phase synchrony measurements were taken from intracranial electrode grids implanted in epileptic subjects. Comparisons were made between data from the waking state and from the period of unconsciousness immediately following a generalised tonic-clonic seizure. Power spectra in the waking state resembled coloured noise. Power spectra in the unconscious state resembled...