Organoids are three-dimensional biological structures grown in vitro from different kinds of stem cells that self-organise mimicking real organs with organ-specific cell types. Recently, researchers have managed to produce human organoids which have structural and functional properties very similar to those of different organs, such as the retina, the intestines, the kidneys, the pancreas, the...
Research on memory has been a major focus in the neurosciences over the past decades. An important advance was achieved by Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, who reported from the 1930s to the 1950s about experiential phenomena induced by electrical brain stimulation in humans, implying neuronal causation of memory. Since then, neuroscientists have addressed the topic of...
The scientific study of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has long relied on comparing conditions in which consciousness is normally present with others in which it is impaired. Brain lesions offer a unique opportunity to understand which anatomical networks are needed to sustain consciousness, but provide limited insights on the patterns of neural activity that can support conscious...
In the ancient Hindu philosophy known as Vedanta, the mind -understood as an accumulation of memories, desires, emotions, thoughts, etc., including the self, that is, the 'I'-thought present in every conscious experience -is said to be a sense like any other physical sense: see, hear, touch, taste, or smell. The implication is that mind is also instrumental in creating our conscious experiences...
Wilhelm Reich is the focus of this second in a series of papers on a group of independent figures from the 1930s into the 1950s—also including Jung, the later Heidegger, Toynbee, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, and Simone Weil—who in the context of those years of crisis articulated overlapping visions of a future “New Age” spirituality that might in some more distant future serve to balance and...
The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological...
경주 황남동 석곽묘군에서 집중적으로 출토된 신라 부착토우의 공간적 편재성(偏在性)과 부착토우 제작자의 성격을 이해하기 위해 최근에 조사, 보고된 경주 쪽샘유적 출토품을 포함하여 현재까지 보고된 경주지역 신라 부착토우의 표현 대상과 방식을 살펴보았다. 이를 통해 지금까지 보고된 부착토우는 제작 방식에서는 과감한 과장과 생략 기법을 공유하면서도 그 표현 소재는 일정한 레퍼토리로 한정되는데 그러한 소재의 거의 대부분이 황남동 석곽묘군 출토품에서 확인됨을 알 수 있었다. 이러 한 부착토우의 공간적 편재성과 표현 방식의 공통성 및 소재의 한정성을 설명하기 위해 샤머니즘과 ASC 및 미니어처에 대한 비교문화적인 연구 성과를 검토하였다. 그에 기반하여 신라의 부착토우는 신라인의 일상이나 희로애락, 또는 재생,...
How are the myriad stimuli arriving at our senses transformed into conscious thought? To address this question, in a series of studies, we asked whether a common mechanism underlies loss of information processing in unconscious states across different conditions, which could shed light on the brain mechanisms of conscious cognition. With a novel approach, we brought together for the first time,...
Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference, and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena, including consciousness. In active inference, action selection is driven by an objective function that evaluates possible future actions with respect to current,...
Hysteresis, the discrepancy in forward and reverse pathways of state transitions, is observed during changing levels of consciousness. Identifying the underlying mechanism of hysteresis phenomena in the brain will enhance the ability to understand, monitor, and control state transitions related to consciousness. We hypothesized that hysteresis in brain networks shares the same underlying...