Chapter 14 - Consciousness & Attention

Consciousness

Subjective, first-person experience

Includes: awareness of the world around you (conscious perception) & inner world (memory, rumination, introspection)

Materialists

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

Argue that the human mind may be ‘Machine’ & through scientific study we can derive the laws of the mind

• Most neuroscientists inherently operate from this perspective

Though we don’t know what the underlying mechanisms are, we assume the brain contributes to consciousness

Easy Problem of Consciousness

Understanding which brain systems, circuits, & patterns of activity contribute to consciousness

Hard Problem of Consciousness

Understanding how brain systems, circuits, & activity patterns produce Qualia

Qualia

Elements of subjective experience

EX: Specific shade of maroon you perceive

Endel Tulving

Coined the term episodic memory

Defined 3 types of consciousness the humans and/or animals can possess

• Anoetic

• Noetic

• Autonoetic

Anoetic Consciousness

Subjective experience of the external environment in the present only

NO conscious knowledge or judgement

NO self awareness

Noetic Consciousness

Awareness of the environment as well as conscious knowledge

NOT just passive experience of external world BUT involves ability to consciously make choices

Does NOT require self-awareness

Autonoetic Consciousness

Inner, self-aware form of subjective experience

Comes from ability to ruminate on one’s own experience by consciously recollecting past or imagining future

• Tulving dubbed this process ‘mental time travel’

Patient KC

Following a motorcycle accident, he had an injury to his medial temporal lobe & several subcortical areas

• Suffered profound amnesia for episodes (both anterograde & retrograde)

• Could not imagine the future

• Did not seem to ruminate at all

Tulving concluded he lost the typical human capacity for autonoetic consciousness

• Could learn & retain word sequences & definitions (semantic) even though he could NOT recall the experience of learning them (episodic)

His brain injury may have shifted him from autonoetic to noetic consciousness

Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness

Proposed by Guilo Tononi

Attempts to explain why some systems produce conscious experience

• Focus on hierarchical processing (like used in visual system)

• Info from earlier stages are combined to create added info about a visual stimulus

Cortex is able to do this because cortical regions are richly interconnected

According to this theory, consciousness is related to ability of cortical regions to communicate & generate info by integrating earlier stages of stimulus processing

Integrated Information, Sleep, & Wakefulness

‘Conductor’ of Consciousness

Francis Crick

Argued the integrated nature of consciousness required a ‘conductor’ to coordinate all the fractionated elements of perception into a single subjective experience

• ‘Conductor’ should be relatively small area of brain that:

  • is richly interconnected w/ sensory regions but does NOT have a direct sesnory function