Neuroimaging the consciousness of self: Review, and conceptual-methodological framework

Could Self-Consciousness Be Enhanced in Alzheimer’s Disease? An Approach from Emotional Sensorial Stimulation

“…Several works also suggested that the deficits of those SC factors were more dependent on an orbitofrontal functioning and related to the DMN [56][57][58][59]. The DMN seems to ensure the coherence of the Self and is put into operation at resting states, when the subject is focused on himself (meditation, body/mind wandering state, etc.)…”

“…They also suggested that people with AD lose the ability to coherently update and integrate their Self, due to inefficient resting state functioning resulting from alterations in cortical midline structures and associated DMN functional connectivity. The neurosynth meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies made by the team of Dr. Frewen [56] suggested that the regions of interest for SC neural networks could essentially be the cortical midline structures and insula, besides ventral and anterior/middle medial prefrontal cortex. Nevertheless, there are criticisms of the theory of cortical midline structure and the DMN mediation of Self processing [63][64][65].…”

What is neurophilosophy: Do we need a non-reductive form?

“…Most fundamentally in the perspective of parallelism, problems which require both empirical (neuro-)sciences and philosophy to be solved do not even exist, more accurately because topics and problems which allegedly span across the disciplines are nothing but errors which are initially induced by conceptual confusions already inherent in the philosophical realm and then transferred to empirical sciences. Bennett and Hacker (2003) exemplify that philosophical misconceptions also involve the case of (self-)consciousness, especially proceeding from the notion of the self as an entity by Descartes (1641Descartes ( /1993 to the self as a psychological feature which is supposed to be accessible via introspection by Locke (1690Locke ( /1996, over to the corresponding notion of a phenomenal self in present-days cognitive neuroscience and its relation to specific brain regions and networks (Damasio 1999(Damasio , 2000(Damasio , 2010Frewen et al 2020;Gazzaniga 2000Gazzaniga , 2005LeDoux 2003;Panksepp 1998Panksepp , 2003Turk et al 2003;Wolff et al 2018). These postulations which account for any additional self within consciousness and related questions concerning the underlying ontological status of such a self are fallacious and meaningless (Bennett and Hacker 2003;Hacker 2007Hacker , 2013.…”

Bridging the gap – Spontaneous fluctuations shape stimulus-evoked spectral power

“…Even in the absence of specific experimental stimulation, neural activity displays spontaneous fluctuations with a characteristic temporal and spatial structure [1][2][3][4][5] . This spontaneous neural activity has been associated with various forms of internally-oriented cognition, such as mind wandering [6][7][8][9] , self-referential processing [10][11][12][13][14][15] , mental time travel [16][17][18][19] and social cognition/theory of mind 20,21 . While spontaneous activity is typically studied in stimulus-free "resting-state" designs, it persists in cognitive tasks as trial-by-trial fluctuations in neural activity.…”

“…The time-domain electrophysiological signal is known to reflect synchronous postsynaptic potentials of many neurons 48 . In contrast, frequency domain analyses allow one to record cortical oscillations such as alpha (8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13), theta (4)(5)(6)(7)(8), and beta (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25) 47 ; these are thought to reflect cortical feedback loops or neurotransmitter-related processes 49,50 . Frequency-domain analyses also reveal arrhythmic "scale-free" activity, which has been associated with excitation-inhibition balance [51][52][53] and complex network models of self-organized criticality [54][55][56] .…”