Conscious experience and episodic memory: hippocampus at the crossroads.
Frontiers in Psychology 2013 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00304 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Default mode network |
| Keywords | Consciousness Emotional feelings Episodic memory Hallucinations Mental imagery Schizophrenia Θ oscillations |
| Key points | Proposes that conscious experience is a symbolic representation of hippocampal event memory encoding, integrating sensory and contextual information to form allocentric event codes. |
Abstract
If an instance of conscious experience of the seemingly objective world around us could be regarded as a newly formed event memory, much as an instance of mental imagery has the content of a retrieved event memory, and if, therefore, the stream of conscious experience could be seen as evidence for ongoing formation of event memories that are linked into episodic memory sequences, then unitary conscious experience could be defined as a symbolic representation of the pattern of hippocampal neuronal firing that encodes an event memory - a theoretical stance that may shed light into the mind-body and binding problems in consciousness research. Exceedingly detailed symbols that describe patterns of activity rapidly self-organizing, at each cycle of the θ rhythm, in the hippocampus are instances of unitary conscious experience that jointly constitute the stream of consciousness. Integrating object information (derived from the ventral visual stream and orbitofrontal cortex) with contextual emotional information (from the anterior insula) and spatial environmental information (from the dorsal visual stream), the hippocampus rapidly forms event codes that have the informational content of objects embedded in an emotional and spatiotemporally extending context. Event codes, formed in the CA3-dentate network for the purpose of their memorization, are not only contextualized but also allocentric representations, similarly to conscious experiences of events and objects situated in a seemingly objective and observer-independent framework of phenomenal space and time. Conscious perception, creating the spatially and temporally extending world that we perceive around us, is likely to be evolutionarily related to more fleeting and seemingly internal forms of conscious experience, such as autobiographical memory recall, mental imagery, including goal anticipation, and to other forms of externalized conscious experience, namely dreaming and hallucinations; and evidence pointing to an important contribution of the hippocampus to these conscious phenomena will be reviewed.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on default mode network, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs | 2014 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The default mode network in cognition: a topographical perspective | 2021 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The default mode network: where the idiosyncratic self meets the shared social world | 2021 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The default-mode, ego-functions and free-energy: a neurobiological account of Freudian ideas | 2010 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Cooperation between the default mode network and the frontal–parietal network in the production of an internal train of thought | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cited by 6
- Deeper into dissociative Amnesia: A perspective from Higher-Order theories of consciousness Consciousness and Cognition January 21, 2026
- Total recall: Detecting autobiographical memory retrieval in the absence of behaviour. Neuropsychologia May 3, 2025
- The Common Basis of Memory and Consciousness: Understanding the Brain as a Write–Read Head Interacting With an Omnipresent Background Field Frontiers in Psychology January 10, 2020
- Neurotypical subjective experience is caused by a hippocampal simulation. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science September 2017
- Response to ‘Hippocampus as a wormhole: gateway to consciousness’ WIREs Cognitive Science September 1, 2017
and 1 more in the library
Cites 7
- A default mode of brain function Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences January 16, 2001
- Rhinal-hippocampal connectivity determines memory formation during sleep. Brain January 2006
- Early neural correlates of conscious somatosensory perception. Journal of Neuroscience May 1, 2005
- Functional connectivity in the resting brain: A network analysis of the default mode hypothesis Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences December 27, 2002
- Consciousness. Brain July 1, 2001
and 2 more in the library