Hot answers tagged consciousness
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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 ...
13
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 ...
12
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 ...
11
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 ...
11
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 'subcoscious' is ...
8
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 ...
8
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 ...
7
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 ...
7
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 ...
7
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 ...
6
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.
As ...
6
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 ...
6
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 ...
6
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 ...
6
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 ...
6
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 ...
5
So how much information is lost when one person is trying to convey these personal experiences with another person? Will actions carry more relevant data than words when explaining a personal experience?
I believe this really depends completely upon both what specific words you use to describe the experience / emotion as well as the experiences and ...
5
This phenomenon is called highway hypnosis (also called driving without attention mode or white line fever) and is an example of procedural memory (or automaticity). Procedural memory is the ability to perform certain tasks without conscious awareness.
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A more computational explanation can be found in the expectation-based reasoning literature. The theory suggests that people are always generating expectations of what they expect to sense (see/hear/smell/feel etc) in the near future. These expectations are matched against observations. If expectations and observations match, then all is good. When they ...
5
This is an interesting idea, but I do not think it's correct. One piece of information that goes against the idea is this: auditory information is encoded by both frequency and amplitude modulation of neural spiking. The idea of spiking rate directly correlating with frequency is at odds with the idea of spiking rate containing this sort of "meta" ...
5
The presentation of flickering lights usually leads to so-called steady-state visual evoked potentials, that is, oscillatory responses in the visual cortex with the frequency of the stimulus as well as its harmonics. See for example:
Herrmann CS. (2001)
Human EEG responses to 1-100 Hz flicker: resonance phenomena in visual cortex and their potential ...
5
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 ...
4
This is just a sketch of an answer.
It is important to clarify how we define "self-awareness".
The self: There is a huge social psychological literature on the self.
For a scientific review, see for example Ellemers et al (2002).
Even the concept of self-awareness is contentious in that it posits that there is a self to be discovered whereas I assume most ...
4
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 ...
4
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 ...
4
There is nothing surprising or unusual in this. It is a straightforward application of skilled learning (the driving or whatever), habit formation (route following), and having your conscious attention on something else. Back in the 1990s, when I was doing landscaping, I used to make good use of this effect by consciously reviewing things I had recently ...
4
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 ...
3
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 ...
3
EDIT: To address the changed question:
Similar to how mental visualization stimulates the same neurons/blood flow that actually seeing something does, I suspect that brain scans will show similar processing occuring during the dream interaction as occur during real interactions.
The difference is that the brain is creating the entire subjective ...
3
I don't think the scientific literature would necessarily describe the process as "shifting thought between subconscious and conscious awareness" but putting exact definitions aside, obviously this does occur.
When I recall information, in some sense information is being moved from the unconscious to the conscious part of my mind. By focusing on a different ...
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