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The major neural models of consciousness at the moment roughly fall into two camps: cognitive and phenomenological. They are defined by controversy surrounding what types of experience qualify as concious.
Cognitive models
On the one hand there are strong cognitive models of consciousness, such as the one proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, where consciousness ...
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If by continuity you mean, "a feeling that I am who I was before the operation, (perhaps with some changes)", then it seems that each hemisphere would separately maintain continuity, in the same way patients after massive strokes and other sudden brain injuries don't usually feel "they are a different person".
Research by Turk et al. (2003) suggests it's ...
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The confusion originates from Sigmund Freud who initialized the field with his idea of the unconscious mind. Freud was of course Austrian, and used the terms das Unbewusste and das Vorbewusste. These are most accurately translated to unconscious and preconscious. The latter is the technical term for what you called 'subconscious'.
The word 'subconscious' ...
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Yes! Recent work using fMRI has shown that subjects can indeed control localized brain regions through practice [1]. Some regions that have been tested include the rostal ACC [2] responsible for pain perception, PPA responsible for representing locations, and FFA responsible for representing faces. Repeated experiments seem to suggest the phenomenon is ...
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Short answer: Because areas of the brain needed for remembering are turned off during dreaming.
Dream Amnesia:
The process of converting perception into a memory construct that can be stored is called encoding, and is essentially the same during both wakefulness and sleep: That is, the same factors can hamper or promote successful encoding when awake or ...
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Modern homunculus arguments don't assert that there is physically a little man in your head. This would be a completely vacuous argument, and nobody would make it in the present day. When people make the homunculus fallacy today, they usually do it in the same fashion as you do: all the sensory information is assembled 'somewhere' and then 'some brain region'...
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When you dream you're in REM sleep (rapid eye movement). REM sleep is only slightly more "deep" than stage 1 of non-REM which means it's not that hard to wake you up in the first place.
Dying in a dream is a stressful event, which causes your brain to release adrenaline. You can't sleep and have an adrenaline rush at the same time so you wake up.
These ...
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One of Koch's collaborators, Francis Crick (yes, that Francis Crick, much later in his career), put forth an interesting theory with Koch that while perhaps is a bit far fetched, it's worth mentioning for sake of a slightly different perspective.
Crick and Koch posited the claustrum (see diagram below) as one of the seats of consciousness in the brain. ...
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You have to break down the question in two parts.
(1) Is it possible to entrain brain oscillations by presenting oscillating lights or tones?
Yes, it is possible to evoke "response phenomena" in the brain by presenting participants with oscillatory stimuli. The technical term for this phenomenon is "steady state evoked potential" and it was demonstrated ...
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Parallel processes are often studied in a so called 'dual task' paradigm, where participants are drawing a picture and reciting a poem or, as in your example, counting and thinking about other things.
Often this method is used to demonstrate limits in attention and find insights into how the brain works (in a serial versus parallel manner). Training is an ...
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I don't know what precisely "nerve signals" is supposed to refer to, but neurons exchange information mainly via one pathway: neurotransmitters. And these do not travel the synaptic cleft via quantum tunnelling - obviously, since quantum tunnelling is a phenomenon on a quantum scale (concerning electrons), while neurotransmitters are far larger, at the ...
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During REM sleep (during which dreams seem to occur), we experience muscular atonia – our muscle can’t move. When the region responsible for muscular atonia is impaired, patients seem to live through their dreams. It has been studied in cats by Michel Jouvet.
I believe that this shows that it is reasonable to trust our subjective experience here : we are ...
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Apparently your question is on backward masking, which means that the masker follows the stimulus (probe) in time. Backward masking generally occurs at higher levels, typically the cortex. In case of visual stimuli this can be the primary visual cortex, or V1 (Mace et al. 2005). Ongoing processing of the probe is then thought to be interfered with by the ...
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Sort of, think of what it's like when you're asleep, not dreaming. Or if you've ever been knocked-out via anesthesia. No-consciousness, just a gap in time.
The question can't really be answered though because it's asking how one might perceive a lack of consciousness, consciously.
Here's an interesting study on the transition from an unconscious to ...
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The fact that these people don't exhibit a lot of change in behavior, and report no real difference after the operation (other than in contrived tests) suggests that our idea of a single conscious "self" is simply wrong.
This sort of question is probably never going to be answered to anyone's satisfaction, any more than you could answer questions about what ...
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Not only can brain activation be controlled though consciousness (which is expected under most reductionist accounts of the mind-brain problem) and measured in the lab (as @Jeff's answer showed) but it can actually be used as an interface!
Erik Ramsey is locked-in syndrome patient and is incapable of movement apart from his eyes. However, he has control of ...
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A minor addition to Jeff:
There are ongoing researchs on controlling brain's response (e.g amygdala) to negative situations and using this techniques for psychiatric interventions (e.g. for anxiety disorders, depression). [1]
There are different possibilities for learning adaptive coping strategies with simple, stuctured biofeedback training setups. But ...
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Consciousness research in Neuroscience is relatively new, so there isn't yet any consensus on how consciousness works precisely (or an agreed upon definition).
My understanding is that the current majority view is that consciousness is distributed throughout the brain (while I can't track down a reference), so transecting the Corpus Callosum won't "...
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I have to partly disagree with schultem here-- he is right that the dual task paradigm is used to study multitasking, but the idea that we can truly do two cognitive tasks at the same time is still contentious. In particular, the opposing view might say that we can't really do two cognitive processes at the same time, but we are in fact switching between the ...
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My answer to the question is yes. I have personally experimented (not voluntarily) conscious dreams a few years ago.To be more precise, I was conscious in dreams but also conscious to dream.
Of course this answer is a testimony, not a scientific proof, of the existence of conscious dream.
But maybe in cognitive science, many serious testimonies constitute a ...
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I'm not sure what you're asking. If it's found that there's awareness of the relationships in the experiment then typically it's argued that's not conditioning and the behaviour is modified through insight. It's been a bone of contention with respect to classical conditioning and humans in the past. You might want to look at Lovibond and Shanks (2002). I ...
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What you describe is the textbook definition of a habit: routines of behavior that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. These are triggered by some external (say, being behind the driver's well of a car) or internal (say, being upset) stimuli. This activates chunks of procedural memory, which attempts to carry out a task that was usually ...
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One thing that comes to mind is the discussion over why English-speaking people think submarines cannot swim, while they think airplanes can fly. Supposedly in Russian, though, they do refer to submarines as "swimming."
Meanwhile, we ask whether computers can think, without really realizing that this question turns out to be simply a question about ...
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Communication is always a lossy and inexact process. If I am trying to convey information to you - the times of trains, for example - I can use dates and times that I can be confident that you will interpret the same way I do. But you may not - I may say the train leaves at 8:40, and you assume I mean the morning, whereas I actually mean the evening. So ...
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If you are searching specific part of the brain, I think that frontal regions of cortex will be an answer(In particular, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which was associated with self-focused metacognitive evaluation). But, as it common in real life, becoming aware of dreaming state required coordinated work of different parts of brain.
You can read this ...
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This is a complicated and loaded question. As Neuroskeptic noted, our understanding of consciousness is very poor (in fact, we don't know how to define it most of the time). To see some of the best current definitions, take a look at:
What are current neuronal explanations and models of 'consciousness'?
We definitely can't infer arbitrary properties of ...
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Introduction
Your thoughts seem to straddle panpsychism and computationalism. It is also possible you are just raising a question about physicalism: "if mental thoughts are a result of physical interactions, then why would consciousness be limited to things with brains?". Well, the short answer is that it's fundamentally not, but neither is a fusion ...
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Research exists on craniopagus twins, maybe most notably Tatiana and Krista, who seem to share sensory input somewhat. I doubt that connective mechanisms such as this abnormal case would suffice to permit "compound cognition" in ways that would enhance cognitive ability similarly to your point about hominid evolution. Your relatively simple proposal for a ...
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State dependent memory could play a role in quickly forgetting dreams after awakening.
See my question here: What is the scientific term for unexpected, spontaneous dream recall? I ask about a phenomenon where dream recall happens much later potentially weeks or months after awakening.
I would venture to hypothesize that Melatonin might play a role as a ...
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