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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 is ...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 ...
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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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This is partially an aspect of the binding problem.
Sensory information arrives in parallel as a variety of heterogeneous hints, (shapes, colors, motions, smells and sounds) encoded in partly modular systems. Typically many objects are present at once. The result is an urgent case of what has been labelled the binding problem. We must collect the hints, ...
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David Chalmers has argued against the thermostat view, suggesting that adaptation to the environment is not sufficient. John Searle also disagrees that the current state of machine learning is capable of consciousness on the grounds that information processing is not a sufficient criterion (public lecture, 2016). Both of these philosophers emphasize clarity ...
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Q: Does our consciousness die when we go to sleep or fall into a coma?
A: No, neuroscientifically speaking, the consciousness does not die when we are sleeping or are in a coma; it is just in a sleep mode or in a severely depressed mode. This is because the group of neural circuits that function to create consciousness (ref 1, 2, 3) does not die when we are ...
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Don't know the answer (I think no one does), but you should have a look at this paper: A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. O'Regan JK, Noë A., BBS 2001 PUBMED
In short the proposed answer is that modalities are subject to different sensory-motor contingencies. For example, when you move forward the visual input undergoes very ...
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The question:
I'm wondering where the original person's "consciousness" would "transfer"
Presupposes a Cartesian Ego; or the idea that consciousness is something separate, ethereal, and indivisible. I recommend reading some Daniel Dennett and Derek Parfit to cure yourself of this common assumption; a good philosophical starting point is Parfit's "Reasons ...
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If non-human animals do have intelligence too, why is their intelligence not as advanced as humans?
Notions like “advanced” or “better” really have no place in evolutionary thinking. Again, evolutionary fitness is about self-reproduction and success compared to whatever competition is present at any moment. There is no force “optimizing” species to meet ...
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Wikipedia is often a good place to start for basic questions like these. Wikipedia has separate pages devoted to the mind, the brain, and even the mind–body problem, which is one example of the many theoretical challenges implied by the distinctions between "mind" and "brain". Simply stated:
The brain is a physical organ. It's entirely possible that much of ...
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