| dc.description.abstract | There seems to be a tendency within the education of neuroscience and cognitive psychology to give little attention to what is not well understood. One subject that tends to get left out of education for this reason is the concept of consciousness. There have been, however, a number of studies that tried to address the question of how brain processes are related to consciousness.
The main question of this thesis therefore is: what are, according to contemporary views, the cognitive and neuronal processes that are needed for, or correlated with conscious experience?
Through high level cognitive theories a scientific understanding of consciousness was arrived. Based on this, lower level neural theories where developed, focusing on how neurons interact with each other, and which neurons/areas interact with each other during conscious and unconscious processing. Three important theories will be discussed to illustrate this.
First, the global workspace hypothesis will be discussed which is a cognitive theory. It was developed to, for the first time after behaviourism, address questions on consciousness scientifically. It states that different forms of information are usually autonomously and unconsciously processed in different brain areas. Consciousness is however derived when brain areas share their output to a global ‘workspace’ onto which different areas are connected such as for instance memory, language and association areas. Second, the 40 Hz theory is discussed which was based on the same notions as the global workspace theory but which takes a neural point of view, and focuses on how remote brain areas communicate to form a unified conscious percept. It states that neurons in different brain areas that are involved in conscious percept, fire in synchronized oscillations in order to bind their information processing. Finally, the recurrent processing theory is considered which is also a neural theory of consciousness that is to some extend based on the notions of the global workspace hypotheses but focuses on which areas communicate during conscious percept and more specifically on the course of this communication. This theory deviates from previous theories of consciousness in its’ notion of how to measure consciousness. Most theories use an intuitive concept of consciousness, i.e. that people can report on what they are conscious of, and so reportability can be used as a measure of consciousness. However, the recurrent processing theory states that reportability might not always be sufficient for measuring consciousness (for instance in split brain and locked in patients) and states that a fully neural description of consciousness is needed. According to this theory, consciousness is arrived when recurrent processing between higher and lower order areas takes place, regardless of peoples reports. | |
