Learning to Be Conscious

Cleeremans, Axel; Achoui, Dalila; Beauny, Arnaud; Keuninckx, Lars; Martin, Jean‐Rémy; Muñoz-Moldes, Santiago; Vuillaume, Laurène; Heering, Adélaïde de

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.11.011

Cited by 85 publications

(86 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…Linking consciousness to a cognitive process Synopsis. Many cognitive processes have been linked to consciousness including learning (Cleeremans, 2007;Cleeremans et al, 2019), body ownership (Faivre et al, 2015), language (Gazzaniga, 1970), integrated and egocentric encoding of the world (Barron & Klein, 2016) and homoeostatic bodily responses (Critchley et al, 2004), to name a few. Some ToCs are not explicit as to whether the proposed cognitive process is necessary for consciousness, sufficient, or both.…”

Section: Facing Up To the Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness

Doerig

Schurger

Herzog

2020

Cognitive Neuroscience

111

116

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Consciousness is now a well-established field of empirical research. A large body of experimental results has been accumulated and is steadily growing. In parallel, many Theories of Consciousness (ToCs) have been proposed. These theories are diverse in nature, ranging from computational to neurophysiological and quantum theoretical approaches. This contrasts with other fields of natural science, which host a smaller number of competing theories. We suggest that one reason for this abundance of extremely different theories may be the lack of stringent criteria specifying how empirical data constrains ToCs. First, we argue that consciousness is a well-defined topic from an empirical point of view and motivate a purely empirical stance on the quest for consciousness. Second, we present a checklist of criteria that, we propose, empirical ToCs need to cope with. Third, we review 13 of the most influential ToCs and subject them to the criteria. Our analysis helps to situate these different ToCs in the theoretical landscapeand sheds light on their strengths and weaknesses from a strictly empirical point of view.

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Section: Facing Up To the Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness

Doerig

Schurger

Herzog

2020

Cognitive Neuroscience

111

116

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“…I believe that the evidence points to the need for the kind of additional processing that cognitive circuits enable. In particular, I favor the higherorder theory of consciousness, which assumes that prefrontal cortex actively re-represents the sensory cortex information and transforms the nonconscious sensory representation into a conscious experience [7][8][9][10].…”

Section: Magazinementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Higher-order theory, as noted, has traditionally assumed that the penultimate non-conscious state that is re-represented by prefrontal cortex is a sensory cortex state, and that the rerepresentation does something to make this lower-level state conscious [7][8][9][10]. But the thrust of the discussion above is that sensory states might not be the only, or even the main, lower-level states that are antecedent to conscious experiences.…”

Section: Higher-order Experience In Light Of Non-conscious Working Mementioning

confidence: 99%

How does the non-conscious become conscious?

LeDoux

2020

Current Biology

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“…However, we found such a correlation only in the novice CTL group and not in the highly trained LTM group. Prolonged engagement in such altered conscious experiences through meditation would arguably helps form and refine metacognitive models about them such that they can be reported more accurately (Cleeremans et al, 2020). In this sense, the lack of correlation of heart-rate with subjective experience in the LTMs would suggest that prolonged meditation training enables one to "explain away" variations in heart-rate as an incidental rather than constitutive correlate of such experiences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Alpha and theta brain oscillations are inversely related to progressive levels of meditation depth

Katyal¹

2020

Preprint

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Despite much work on the neural and physiological correlates of meditation practices, little is known about how these correlates relate to altered subjective experiences known to accompany such practices. The meditation depth questionnaire (MEDEQ) measures 5 different categories of altered subjective experiences accompanying meditation graded into five levels of depths: hindrances, relaxation, personal self, transpersonal qualities and transpersonal self. In this study, we investigated the neural and physiological correlates of subjectively-experienced meditation depth across these five levels. In two groups of participants, long-term meditators (LTM) and meditation-naïve controls (CTL), we measured how MEDEQ response covaried with electroencephalography, pulse and respiration across a baseline state and two types of meditation practices. As expected, we observed that CTLs reported experiencing more hindrances than LTMs, while only LTMs reported significantly greater experiences of transpersonal qualities and transpersonal self following the two meditation practices compared to baseline. In the brain, we found that while alpha (7–13 Hz) power correlated negatively with hindrances, its correlation with subjective experience became increasingly positive as depth-level increased to transpersonal self. Theta (4–6 Hz) power however showed the exact opposite pattern with a positive correlation with hindrances and a gradually increasing negative correlation with depth-level. Brain topographies moreover revealed that deepening meditation experiences were accompanied by deactivation of theta power at different loci in the two groups—frontal midline in LTMs and frontal lateral in CTLs—corresponding to the two different aspects of executive/metacognitive processing, monitoring and regulation respectively. This supports the idea that, while critical for overcoming hindrances, metacognitive processing prevents deeper meditation experiences requiring effortless attention or meditative absorption, and that prolonged training can enable suspension of such processing at an earlier stage of processing. Meditation depth was also associated with reduced heart rate in CTLs but not in LTMs indicating that prolonged meditation training may help reduce interoceptive influences on conscious experience. While alpha and theta oscillations have been found to reliably change with meditation practice, ours is the first study to our knowledge to show how they are simultaneously related to different types and levels of subjective experiences accompanying such practices.

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Learning to Be Conscious

Cited by 85 publications

References 79 publications

Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness

Hard criteria for empirical theories of consciousness

How does the non-conscious become conscious?

Alpha and theta brain oscillations are inversely related to progressive levels of meditation depth

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