Week 9 Readings Flashcards
What is the first-person perspective?
Observations made by individuals about their own conscious experiences, also known as introspection or a subjective point of view. Phenomenology refers to the description and investigation of such observations.
What is contemplative science?
A research area concerned with understanding how contemplative practices such as meditation can affect individuals, including changes in their behavior, their emotional reactivity, their cognitive abilities, and their brains. Contemplative science also seeks insights into conscious experience that can be gained from first-person observations by individuals who have gained extraordinary expertise in introspection.
What was René Descartes’ position on the mind-body problem?
Descartes’ position, known as dualism, was that the mental and physical are different substances.
How does dualism contrast with reductionist views?
Dualism asserts that mental and physical phenomena are different substances, while reductionism claims that mental phenomena can be explained through physical phenomena.
What is a key factor in generating visual awareness?
Visual awareness depends on a reciprocal exchange of information between multiple brain areas, particularly between higher-level visual areas and the primary visual cortex.
What did Pascual-Leone & Walsh (2001) discover about visual awareness and motion perception?
They found that directly activating the visual motion area (V5) can make you see motion, but disrupting the feedback signal from V5 to the primary visual cortex prevents motion perception, highlighting the importance of this reciprocal exchange.
Why doesn’t paying full attention or deeply analyzing an image guarantee awareness of it?
Because visual awareness is not solely dependent on attention or analysis but requires a specific reciprocal exchange of information across brain areas.
How does brain damage to the primary visual cortex affect visual awareness?
Damage to the primary visual cortex can lead to cortical blindness, where the person claims not to see anything despite some preserved visual abilities.
What is cortical blindness?
Cortical blindness occurs when brain damage to the primary visual cortex results in a lack of conscious visual experience, even though other areas of the brain still receive visual input.
What explains the preserved visual abilities in people with cortical blindness?
Visual input may still reach other areas of the brain, such as V5, through projections from structures like the thalamus and superior colliculus, allowing unconscious detection of visual stimuli.
What is blindsight?
Blindsight is a condition where a person with cortical blindness can analyze and respond to visual stimuli without conscious awareness, often detectable only through tasks requiring guessing.
Why can’t a person with cortical blindness consciously perceive visual stimuli despite V5 activation?
The reciprocal exchange of information between V5 and the damaged primary visual cortex is disrupted, preventing conscious visual awareness.
What role does neural synchronization play in visual awareness?
Neural synchronization enhances communication between neural populations by aligning their excitability cycles, which is crucial for generating visual awareness.
How does synchronization of neural excitability enhance communication?
Communication is enhanced when one neural population transmits information during its excitable phase and the target population receives it in its excitable phase, promoting efficient information exchange.
Which oscillatory frequencies are associated with visual awareness?
Beta-band (13–30 Hz) and gamma-band (30–100 Hz) neural synchronization frequencies are closely linked with visual awareness.
What does the Global Neuronal Workspace Theory of Consciousness propose?
It suggests that visual awareness arises from the sharing of information across prefrontal, inferior parietal, and occipital regions of the cerebral cortex through synchronized neural activity.
What does the Information Integration Theory of Consciousness propose?
It proposes that consciousness arises from the complexity of shared information. The more complex and intricately interrelated the shared information, the richer the conscious experience.
Minimal consciousness occurs when the structure of shared information is simple, while rich conscious experiences arise when the structure is complex and intricately interrelated.
How is complexity defined in the Information Integration Theory?
Complexity refers to the number of interrelated informational units or ideas generated by a web of local and global sharing of information.
What happens when all neurons are connected to every other neuron?
If all neurons are connected, they tend to activate together, generating few distinctive ideas, leading to a low level of consciousness.
What happens with very low neuronal connectivity?
With low connectivity, neurons activate independently, generating numerous but unassociated ideas, which also results in a low level of consciousness.
What neural structure promotes a rich level of consciousness?
A suitable mixture of short-, medium-, and long-range neural connections is needed to promote a rich level of consciousness, as seen in the human cerebral cortex.
How does the Information Integration Theory suggest consciousness can be measured?
Consciousness is conceptualized as graded rather than all-or-none, allowing for a quantitative approach to estimate levels of consciousness in nonhuman species and artificial beings.
What is episodic recollection?
Episodic recollection is the ability to reexperience the past and virtually relive an earlier event, representing the pinnacle of conscious human memory functions.
What type of memory is disrupted in people with amnesia due to neurological damage?
Declarative memory, which involves conscious remembering of events and facts, is disrupted in people with amnesia.
Which memory functions are typically spared in amnesia?
Memory functions that do not involve conscious remembering, such as habits, motor skills, cognitive skills, and procedures, are typically spared in amnesia.
Can amnesic individuals perform actions based on prior learning?
Yes, amnesic individuals can execute actions based on prior learning without necessarily having a conscious experience of remembering.
What is perceptual priming, and how does it differ from conscious remembering?
Perceptual priming is a type of memory that enhances processing fluency from prior experiences without conscious recollection. For example, a person can more efficiently perceive a word or face viewed earlier, even if they cannot consciously remember it.
How is perceptual priming preserved in amnesia?
People with amnesia can still demonstrate item-specific fluency (perceptual priming) due to changes in cortical areas, even though they are impaired in consciously recognizing previously seen words or faces.
What brain structure is essential for storing memories of daily events?
The hippocampus, in conjunction with multiple cortical regions, is essential for storing memories of daily events.
How does memory storage become more secure over time?
Memory storage becomes more secure due to interactions between the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex that occur over extended time periods after the initial registration of information.
What does conscious memory retrieval depend on?
Conscious memory retrieval depends on the activity of elaborate networks in the cerebral cortex.
How does memory retrieval without conscious recollection occur?
Memory retrieval without conscious recollection depends on restricted portions of the cortex or on brain regions outside the cortex.
What brain region is responsible for mediating body awareness?
The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is responsible for mediating body awareness.
What happens when the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is damaged?
Damage to the TPJ can cause distorted body awareness, such as feeling like your torso is elongated.
What effect does altered neural activity in the TPJ have?
Altered activity in the TPJ can produce an out-of-body experience, where you feel like your body is in another location, offering a novel perspective on yourself and the world.
How can an out-of-body experience be artificially induced?
An out-of-body experience can be induced by artificially stimulating the temporoparietal junction.
What comparable brain mechanisms generate the normal awareness of self?
Similar brain mechanisms that mediate body awareness also generate the normal awareness of the sense of self and the sensation of being inside a body.
What is the main premise of the Social Neuroscience Theory of Consciousness?
The theory suggests that the ability to predict others’ behavior is crucial for success in social environments, and the brain has developed mechanisms to model other people’s attention and intention.
How does the Social Neuroscience Theory explain the localization of self?
It proposes that the same brain mechanisms used to model others’ attention and intention are adapted to construct a model of one’s own attention and intention, localized in one’s own head and perceived as consciousness.
