Scientific ReportsApril 11, 2018Salah Boussen, Andreas Spiegler, Christian Bénar et al.4 citations
General anesthesia (GA) is a reversible manipulation of consciousness whose mechanism is mysterious at the level of neural networks leaving space for several competing hypotheses. We recorded electrocorticography (ECoG) signals in patients who underwent intracranial monitoring during awake surgery for the treatment of cerebral tumors in functional areas of the brain. Therefore, we recorded the...
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, we need to probe deeply into the nature of physical reality. This leads us to quantum physics and to a second explanatory gap:...
Abstract This paper examines Fechner’s (1859) introduction to experimental psychophysics from a phenomenological perspective. Horst’s (2005) analysis is used to demonstrate the phenomenology that is inherent to classical perceptual psychophysics (Fechner’s “outer” psychophysics). Horst argues that the psychophysical event of perception can only be understood as an intentional intertwining of...
Correlations between memories and dreaming has typically been studied by linking conscious experiences and dream reports, which has illustrated that dreaming reflects waking life events, thoughts, and emotions. As some research suggests that sleep has a function of memory consolidation, and dreams reflect this, researching this relationship further may uncover more useful insights. However,...
Dreaming has often been viewed as a “mysterious” experience entirely distinct from waking cognition. An alternative view proposes that dreams are generated by the same fundamental processes that give rise to spontaneous thought during wakefulness. New evidence suggests that these processes include activity of the brain’s memory systems, supporting consolidation of newly encoded experience....
Sleep paralysis is an experience of being temporarily unable to move or talk during the transitional periods between sleep and wakefulness: at sleep onset or upon awakening. The feeling of paralysis may be accompanied by a variety of vivid and intense sensory experiences, including mentation in visual, auditory, and tactile modalities, as well as a distinct feeling of presence. This chapter...
Dreams are sometimes described as an intensified form of spontaneous waking thought. Lucid dreams may seem to be a counterexample, because metacognitive insight into the fact that one is now dreaming is often associated with the ability to deliberately control the ongoing dream. This chapter uses conceptual considerations and empirical research findings to argue that lucid dreaming is in fact a...
In line with proponents of 4E cognition, Gallagher [2019 Gallagher, S. 2019. Rethinking Nature: Phenomenology and a Non-reductionist Cognitive Science, Australasian Philosophical Review 2/2: 1–15. [Google Scholar]] is concerned that many cognitive phenomena are not amenable to decomposition strategies since their very nature is to be constituted extensively. By contrast the received view on...
Shaun Gallagher’s [2019] ‘Rethinking Nature’ is an attempt to make conceptual space for the relevance of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., to cognitive scientific explanation within an embodied enactivist approach to cognition. Since cognitive science currently presupposes orthodox scientific naturalism—for which nature is nothing over and above the objective...
Phenomenal theories of consciousness assert that this is due to specific neural correlates in the brain, which can be separated from all cognitive functions we can perform. If so, the search for robot consciousness seems to be doomed. In contrast, theories of functional or access consciousness assert that consciousness can be studied only with forms of cognitive access, given by cognitive...