Still wanted—the mechanisms of consciousness!

Frontiers in Psychology

Jaan Aru¹ 

关键词: consciousness;    NCC;    perception;    state of consciousness;    TMS;    multivariate pattern analysis;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00005

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Thirty years ago one of us proposed a theory of perception exemplified by the phenomenon of visual masking, based on neural mechanisms known to be responsible for contents and state of consciousness (Bachmann, 1984). Some of the colleagues labeled it “exotic,” perhaps trying to be polite by avoiding certain other adjectives. Be that as it may, within only a few years consciousness as a serious topic in mind sciences became firmly established (e.g., Baars, 1988; Crick and Koch, 1990). However, it can be argued that since then we have not learned much about the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). Although many influential high-profile studies on consciousness have been published over the last 25 years, it is not clear how much of this research is directly relevant for understanding the neural basis of conscious experience (Aru et al., 2012a; de Graaf et al., 2012; Miller, 2015). The key reason for this pessimistic view is the following: many studies using various experimental paradigms have relied on the contrast between trials with and without conscious perception, but this contrast is not selective for revealing the NCC (Miller, 2007; Aru et al., 2012a; de Graaf et al., 2012). Rather, such contrast can always also lead to processes that in reality precede or follow conscious experience. As the majority of studies have been conducted with some variations of such contrastive analysis, it is hard to estimate how many of these studies are directly informative about NCC. Hence, although there are theories of consciousness that have made it to standard neuroscience textbooks, the puzzle of consciousness persists and the need for focused interdisciplinary attacks on the problem is as timely as ever.

【 授权许可】

CC BY