Figures that can be seen in more than one way are invaluable tools for the study of the neural basis of visual awareness, because such stimuli permit the dissociation of the neural responses that underlie what we perceive at any given time from those ...

Working memory enables us to hold in our ‘mind's eye’ the contents of our conscious awareness, even in the absence of sensory input, by maintaining an active representation of information for a brief period of time. In this review we consider the ...

The hypothesis is defended that brains expressing phenomenal awareness are capable of generating metarepresentations of their cognitive processes, these metarepresentations resulting from an iteration of self–similar cortical operations. Search for ...

Attempting to understand how the brain, as a whole, might be organized seems, for the first time, to be a serious topic of inquiry. One aspect of its neuronal organization that seems particularly central to global function is the rich thalamocortical ...

Words such as ‘consciousness’ and ‘self’ actually encompass a number of distinct phenomena that are loosely lumped together. The study of neurological syndromes allows us to explore the neural mechanisms that might underlie different aspects of self, ...

Neuroimaging techniques that allow the assessment of memory performance in healthy human volunteers while simultaneously obtaining measurements of brain activity in vivo may offer new information on the neural correlates of particular forms of memory ...

The fact that consciousness is a private, first–person phenomenon makes it more difficult to study than other cognitive phenomena that, although being equally private, also have characteristic behavioural signatures. Nonetheless, by combining ...

Conscious sensory perception and its modulation by volition are integral to human mental life. Functional neuroimaging techniques provide a direct means of identifying and characterizing in vivo the systems-level patterns of brain activity associated ...

This paper presents a functional brain–imaging strategy designed to isolate neural correlates of consciousness in humans. This strategy is based on skill learning. In the example presented (rapidly generating verbs for visually presented nouns), a ...

Anosognosia of hemiplegia is of interest for both pragmatic and theoretical reasons. We discuss several neuropsychological theories that have been proposed to explain this deficit. Although for psychological reasons people might deny deficits, the ...

Anatomical and physiological evidence shows that the primate visual brain consists of many distributed processing systems, acting in parallel. Psychophysical studies show that the activity in each of the parallel systems reaches its perceptual end–...

Consciousness has many aspects. These include awareness of the world, feelings of control over one's behaviour and mental state (volition), and the notion of a continuing self. Focal (executive) attention is used to control details of our awareness ...

The clinically described ‘persistent vegetative state’ (PVS), consists of wakefulness unaccompanied by any evidence of the subject's awareness of self or environment. Past studies from our own and other laboratories have used positron emission ...

The neurosciences have advanced to the point that we can now treat consciousness as a scientific problem like any other. The problem is to explain how brain processes cause consciousness and how consciousness is realized in the brain. Progress is ...