Progress in Brain Research
2008
Dhananjay V Chavan
The chapter reviews certain practical aspects related to Vipassana , a first-person method taught by the Buddha, to probe one's stream of conscious experience, its contents and related material events. Although references to Vipassana are found scattered throughout the Pali literature the most comprehensive and detailed account with regard to its practice is contained in the Satipatthana Sutta....
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Rahul Banerjee
The chapter reviews a classical Indian model of consciousness found in the Abhidhamma, a collection of seven treatises in the Pali Canon Tipitaka. The model was based on observations made during advanced vipassana practice, a first-person method taught by the Buddha. The climax of the model consists in the elucidation of 24 'Bridging Relations' causally linking the stream of consciousness, its...
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Narayanan Srinivasan
Research on attention has been closely linked with possible advances in the study of consciousness. Various theories and models have been proposed for attention in the past 50 years. Behavioural, computational, and neuroscientific approaches have been successful in improving our understanding of attentional processes. Given the current status of attention research, what can we say about the...
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Klaus Mainzer
Modern philosophy of mind cannot be understood without recent developments in computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, neuroscience, biology, linguistics, and psychology. Classical philosophy of formal languages as well as symbolic AI assume that all kinds of knowledge must explicitly be represented by formal or programming languages. This assumption is limited by recent...
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Axel Cleeremans
In this chapter, I sketch a conceptual framework which takes it as a starting point that conscious and unconscious cognition are rooted in the same set of interacting learning mechanisms and representational systems. On this view, the extent to which a representation is conscious depends in a graded manner on properties such as its stability in time or its strength. Crucially, these properties...
Progress in Brain Research
2008
Sisir Roy, Rodolfo R Llinas
Pellionisz and Llinás proposed, years ago, a geometric interpretation towards understanding brain function. This interpretation assumes that the relation between the brain and the external world is determined by the ability of the central nervous system (CNS) to construct an internal model of the external world using an interactive geometrical relationship between sensory and motor expression....
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Christopher C. French
70 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have become the focus of much interest in the last 30 years or so. Such experiences can occur both when individuals are objectively near to death and also when they simply believe themselves to be. The experience typically involves a number of different components including a feeling of peace and well-being, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), entering a region of...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Lionel Naccache
13 citations
The scientific study of the cerebral substrate of consciousness has been marked by significant recent achievements, resulting partially from an interaction between the exploration of cognition in both brain-damaged patients and healthy subjects. Several neuropsychological syndromes contain marked dissociations that permit the identification of principles related to the neurophysiology of...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
A neurophilosophical slant on consciousness research.
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Posterior cingulate, precuneal and retrosplenial cortices: cytology and components of the neural network correlates of consciousness.
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Silvia Bünning, Olaf Blanke
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are defined as experiences in which a person seems to be awake and sees his body and the world from a location outside his physical body. More precisely, they can be defined by the presence of the following three phenomenological characteristics: (i) disembodiment (location of the self outside one's body); (ii) the impression of seeing the world from an elevated...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
General anesthesia and the neural correlates of consciousness.
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Functional neuroimaging during altered states of consciousness: how and what do we measure?
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Igor Aleksander
The work from several laboratories on the modeling of consciousness is reviewed. This ranges, on one hand, from purely functional models where behavior is important and leads to an attribution of consciousness to, on the other hand, material work closely derived from the information about the anatomy of the brain. At the functional end of the spectrum, applications are described specifically...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Pierre Maquet, Perrine Ruby, Audrey Maudoux et al.
In this chapter, we aimed at further characterizing the functional neuroanatomy of the human rapid eye movement (REM) sleep at the population level. We carried out a meta-analysis of a large dataset of positron emission tomography (PET) scans acquired during wakefulness, slow wave sleep and REM sleep, and focused especially on the brain areas in which the activity diminishes during REM sleep....
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Hans C Lou, Markus Nowak, Troels W Kjaer
In meditation both the quality and the contents of consciousness may be voluntarily changed, making it an obvious target in the quest for the neural correlate of consciousness. Here we present the results of a positron emission tomography study of yoga nidra relaxation meditation when compared with the normal resting conscious state. Meditation is accompanied by a relatively increased perfusion...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Adam Zeman
The concept of consciousness is multifaceted, and steeped in cultural and intellectual history. This paper explores its complexities by way of a series of contrasts: (i) states of consciousness, such as wakefulness and sleep, are contrasted with awareness, a term that picks out the contents of consciousness, which range across all our psychological capacities; (ii) consciousness is contrasted...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Consciousness, information integration, and the brain.
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Bernard J. Baars
Global workspace (GW) theory emerged from the cognitive architecture tradition in cognitive science. Newell and co-workers were the first to show the utility of a GW or "blackboard" architecture in a distributed set of knowledge sources, which could cooperatively solve problems that no single constituent could solve alone. The empirical connection with conscious cognition was made by Baars...
Progress in Brain Research
2005
Computational correlates of consciousness.
Progress in Brain Research
2004
Adam Zeman
The past decade has provided a wealth of data for theorists of visual awareness. Two empirical approaches, both seeking to dissociate conscious from unconscious neural processes, have been particularly fruitful. The first has focused on the neural correlates of changes in experience occurring in the absence of change in external stimuli, for example during binocular rivalry; the second has...
Progress in Brain Research
2000
L Rapgay, V L Rinpoche, R Jessum
The Tibetan Buddhist classification of mind, its divisions and the system of meditation practices aimed at achieving ideal states of being are a complex presentation of psychological, behavioral and spiritual concepts and processes that demand thorough understanding before assessing their value and outcome (Yeshe, 1995). It is the authors' belief that with the rapid advances in the neuroscience...