Summary Consciousness
Number of pages: 53
Table of content
Lecture 1 - Intro to Consciousness 1
Consciousness 1
Lecture 2 - Illusions and Lesions 1
Blindsight – Cortical blindness 1
Visual Neglect 1
Visual form agnosia 2
Lecture 3 - Neural correlates of consciousness 2
Levels of consciousness 3
The minimal contrast idea 3
Introduction: Dehaene 3
Chapter 1: Dehaene 4
The many facets of consciousness 4
Rival images 4
When attention blinks 4
Masking conscious perception 5
Primacy of the subjective 5
Lecture 4 6
Fusiform face area (FFA) 6
Chapter 2: Dehaene 8
The seats of unconscious operations 8
The brain’s dark side 8
Binding without consciousness 8
Seeing voices 9
Unconscious meaning 9
The great unconscious Wars 9
Unconscious arithmetic 10
Combining concepts without consciousness 10
Attention but unconscious 10
The value of an invisible coin 11
Unconscious mathematics (similar to insight) 11
Statistics during sleep 11
A subliminal bag of tricks 12
Article 1: Dehaene (2001) 12
Lecture 5 13
Higher level unconscious processing 13
Attentional blink 14
Article 2: van Gaal 14
Chapter 3: Dehaene 15
1
, Unconscious statistics, conscious sampling 15
Lasting thoughts 15
The human turing machine 16
A social Sharing device 16
Lecture 6 17
Open monitoring (OM) meditation experiment : 17
Article 3: Slagter et al., 2007 18
Lecture 7 19
Chapter 4 20
The avalanche of consciousness 21
Timing the conscious avalanche 21
Consciousness lags behind the world 21
Isolating the conscious moment 22
Igniting the conscious brain 22
Deep inside the conscious brain 22
The brain web 22
Decoding a conscious thought 22
Inducing a hallucination 23
Destroying consciousness 24
Lecture 8 24
Chapter 5 27
Consciousness is global information sharing 27
Beyond modularity 27
An evolved communication network 27
Sculpting a conscious thought 28
The shape of an idea 28
The restless brain 28
Darwin in the brain 29
A catalog of the unconscious 29
Lecture 9 30
Article 4: van Loon et al., 2015 31
Lecture 10 (Article 5: Lamme 2003) 32
Local recurrency theory 32
Information integration theory and higher order theories 33
Lecture 11 34
Chapter 6: Deheane 36
How to lose your mind 36
Cortico Ergo Sum 37
Conscious novelty detection 37
Pinging the cortex 38
Detecting spontaneous thought 38
Toward clinical interventions 39
Article: Monti et al., 2010 39
2
,Lecture 12 40
Bekinschtein et al., 2009 41
Lecture 13 43
Article summary just above (Bekinschtein) 43
Article: Casali et al., 2009 44
Recovery to consciousness: survivors 45
Lecture 14 46
Chapter 7: Dehaene 47
Conscious babies? 47
Conscious animals? 48
Uniquely human consciousness? 48
Diseases of consciousness? 49
Article: Fleming et al., 2010 49
3
, Lecture 1 - Intro to Consciousness
Consciousness
Easy problems: are about abilities and functions: we need only mechanisms to explain those. These
are problems that we have not solved (perception, memory, etc.) but in principle, we know how to solve (even
if we have not done yet).
Hard problems: Why and how do subjective experiences arise from objective brains (neural
processes)? “Explaining the function doesn’t explain the experience”
Dualistic ideas about consciousness: the mind and body are not identical, and consciousness cannot be
reduced to pure brain activity
Materialism: all emergent phenomena, including consciousness, are the result of material properties and
interactions in the brain
Most neuroscientists are materialist
What is consciousness?
● Dehaene: Conscious experience is a percept, thought, action or feeling, that can be (re)produced or
reported about
● Consciousness means subjective experience or phenomenal experience. The way things seem to me,
as opposed to how they are objective.
● The subjective experience of something
● Qualia: individual instances of subjective conscious experience (i.e., the pain of a headache, the taste
of wine, perceived redness of the sky). The ‘what it is likeness’ of mental states or systems/beings
Lecture 2 - Illusions and Lesions
Illusions and their relevance
Your conscious perception is a construction of the senses not an exact replica of the outside world
Blindsight – Cortical blindness
Patient is functionally blind but can: discriminate shapes, accurately reach for objects, orientation, colour.
Accurate hand positioning for grasping & direction of motion perception.
This is possible through alternative route through subcortex
The lesion is in V1 (visual cortex), where most of the visual information
goes to but some information is still processed by other parts of the brain.
Visual Neglect
A patient can see and has normal vision, but when trying to reproduce an image she ignores part of the area.
This is because of a lesion in the spatial recognition part of the brain. Attending networks are lateralized with
dominance in the right, lesion to the right side leads to stronger neglect.
There is still unconscious processing of the neglected part.
In neglect, there is ignoring in the left hemisphere. Eye movement “heatmaps”
reveals bias towards the right hemisphere.
1
, Visual form agnosia
Case DF
Patient had carbon monoxide poisoning which caused damage to the LOC (lateral occipital cortex)
DF’s symptoms included: unable to identify shapes, objects recognized by colour, unable to copy line drawings
of objects, able to produce line drawings of objects from memory, deficits not related to loss of knowledge
about objects
Slot task
Matching – the patient has to match the orientation of the slot
Posting – the patient has to insert the object in the slot
DF could not match the object to the slot but he could post it
Unconscious behaviour with brain damage
Dissociation in the brain between perception and action
Ventral stream deficit related to problems in perception (e.g. matching), but not for action (posting)
This is also the case in healthy people, as can be seen with illusions.
Perception suffers from illusions
Action is not influenced by illusions
● Ventral stream activation is related to consciousness (perception, suffers from illusions). Necessary for
specific aspects of perceptual experience.
● Dorsal stream activation is unconscious (action, is automatic)
Other ventral stream deficits:
− Colour agnosia (damage to V4)
− Prosopagnosia (face blindness, damage in fusiform area)
− Motion blindness (damage to V5)
Lecture 3 - Neural correlates of consciousness
Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) – the minimal set of neuronal events necessary and sufficient for
conscious experience
- A necessary condition for consciousness is a condition that must be satisfied in order for consciousness to
arise
o E.g. properly working eyes (not sufficient)
- A sufficient condition for consciousness is a condition that, if satisfied, guarantees consciousness to arise.
o E.g. some sort of brain activity
Vigilance – the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep, wake up, faint, enter a coma or
anaesthesia
Attention – the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information
Conscious access – the fact that some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and
becomes reportable to others
Vigilance and attention are just enabling conditions for conscious access à necessary but not always sufficient
to make us aware of a specific piece of information
2
Number of pages: 53
Table of content
Lecture 1 - Intro to Consciousness 1
Consciousness 1
Lecture 2 - Illusions and Lesions 1
Blindsight – Cortical blindness 1
Visual Neglect 1
Visual form agnosia 2
Lecture 3 - Neural correlates of consciousness 2
Levels of consciousness 3
The minimal contrast idea 3
Introduction: Dehaene 3
Chapter 1: Dehaene 4
The many facets of consciousness 4
Rival images 4
When attention blinks 4
Masking conscious perception 5
Primacy of the subjective 5
Lecture 4 6
Fusiform face area (FFA) 6
Chapter 2: Dehaene 8
The seats of unconscious operations 8
The brain’s dark side 8
Binding without consciousness 8
Seeing voices 9
Unconscious meaning 9
The great unconscious Wars 9
Unconscious arithmetic 10
Combining concepts without consciousness 10
Attention but unconscious 10
The value of an invisible coin 11
Unconscious mathematics (similar to insight) 11
Statistics during sleep 11
A subliminal bag of tricks 12
Article 1: Dehaene (2001) 12
Lecture 5 13
Higher level unconscious processing 13
Attentional blink 14
Article 2: van Gaal 14
Chapter 3: Dehaene 15
1
, Unconscious statistics, conscious sampling 15
Lasting thoughts 15
The human turing machine 16
A social Sharing device 16
Lecture 6 17
Open monitoring (OM) meditation experiment : 17
Article 3: Slagter et al., 2007 18
Lecture 7 19
Chapter 4 20
The avalanche of consciousness 21
Timing the conscious avalanche 21
Consciousness lags behind the world 21
Isolating the conscious moment 22
Igniting the conscious brain 22
Deep inside the conscious brain 22
The brain web 22
Decoding a conscious thought 22
Inducing a hallucination 23
Destroying consciousness 24
Lecture 8 24
Chapter 5 27
Consciousness is global information sharing 27
Beyond modularity 27
An evolved communication network 27
Sculpting a conscious thought 28
The shape of an idea 28
The restless brain 28
Darwin in the brain 29
A catalog of the unconscious 29
Lecture 9 30
Article 4: van Loon et al., 2015 31
Lecture 10 (Article 5: Lamme 2003) 32
Local recurrency theory 32
Information integration theory and higher order theories 33
Lecture 11 34
Chapter 6: Deheane 36
How to lose your mind 36
Cortico Ergo Sum 37
Conscious novelty detection 37
Pinging the cortex 38
Detecting spontaneous thought 38
Toward clinical interventions 39
Article: Monti et al., 2010 39
2
,Lecture 12 40
Bekinschtein et al., 2009 41
Lecture 13 43
Article summary just above (Bekinschtein) 43
Article: Casali et al., 2009 44
Recovery to consciousness: survivors 45
Lecture 14 46
Chapter 7: Dehaene 47
Conscious babies? 47
Conscious animals? 48
Uniquely human consciousness? 48
Diseases of consciousness? 49
Article: Fleming et al., 2010 49
3
, Lecture 1 - Intro to Consciousness
Consciousness
Easy problems: are about abilities and functions: we need only mechanisms to explain those. These
are problems that we have not solved (perception, memory, etc.) but in principle, we know how to solve (even
if we have not done yet).
Hard problems: Why and how do subjective experiences arise from objective brains (neural
processes)? “Explaining the function doesn’t explain the experience”
Dualistic ideas about consciousness: the mind and body are not identical, and consciousness cannot be
reduced to pure brain activity
Materialism: all emergent phenomena, including consciousness, are the result of material properties and
interactions in the brain
Most neuroscientists are materialist
What is consciousness?
● Dehaene: Conscious experience is a percept, thought, action or feeling, that can be (re)produced or
reported about
● Consciousness means subjective experience or phenomenal experience. The way things seem to me,
as opposed to how they are objective.
● The subjective experience of something
● Qualia: individual instances of subjective conscious experience (i.e., the pain of a headache, the taste
of wine, perceived redness of the sky). The ‘what it is likeness’ of mental states or systems/beings
Lecture 2 - Illusions and Lesions
Illusions and their relevance
Your conscious perception is a construction of the senses not an exact replica of the outside world
Blindsight – Cortical blindness
Patient is functionally blind but can: discriminate shapes, accurately reach for objects, orientation, colour.
Accurate hand positioning for grasping & direction of motion perception.
This is possible through alternative route through subcortex
The lesion is in V1 (visual cortex), where most of the visual information
goes to but some information is still processed by other parts of the brain.
Visual Neglect
A patient can see and has normal vision, but when trying to reproduce an image she ignores part of the area.
This is because of a lesion in the spatial recognition part of the brain. Attending networks are lateralized with
dominance in the right, lesion to the right side leads to stronger neglect.
There is still unconscious processing of the neglected part.
In neglect, there is ignoring in the left hemisphere. Eye movement “heatmaps”
reveals bias towards the right hemisphere.
1
, Visual form agnosia
Case DF
Patient had carbon monoxide poisoning which caused damage to the LOC (lateral occipital cortex)
DF’s symptoms included: unable to identify shapes, objects recognized by colour, unable to copy line drawings
of objects, able to produce line drawings of objects from memory, deficits not related to loss of knowledge
about objects
Slot task
Matching – the patient has to match the orientation of the slot
Posting – the patient has to insert the object in the slot
DF could not match the object to the slot but he could post it
Unconscious behaviour with brain damage
Dissociation in the brain between perception and action
Ventral stream deficit related to problems in perception (e.g. matching), but not for action (posting)
This is also the case in healthy people, as can be seen with illusions.
Perception suffers from illusions
Action is not influenced by illusions
● Ventral stream activation is related to consciousness (perception, suffers from illusions). Necessary for
specific aspects of perceptual experience.
● Dorsal stream activation is unconscious (action, is automatic)
Other ventral stream deficits:
− Colour agnosia (damage to V4)
− Prosopagnosia (face blindness, damage in fusiform area)
− Motion blindness (damage to V5)
Lecture 3 - Neural correlates of consciousness
Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) – the minimal set of neuronal events necessary and sufficient for
conscious experience
- A necessary condition for consciousness is a condition that must be satisfied in order for consciousness to
arise
o E.g. properly working eyes (not sufficient)
- A sufficient condition for consciousness is a condition that, if satisfied, guarantees consciousness to arise.
o E.g. some sort of brain activity
Vigilance – the state of wakefulness, which varies when we fall asleep, wake up, faint, enter a coma or
anaesthesia
Attention – the focusing of our mental resources onto a specific piece of information
Conscious access – the fact that some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and
becomes reportable to others
Vigilance and attention are just enabling conditions for conscious access à necessary but not always sufficient
to make us aware of a specific piece of information
2
