The great subjective back-referral debate: Do neural responses increase during a train of stimuli?

Pockett, Susan

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2005.04.001

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

(25 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is an interesting fact in this connection that the direct retinal projection to the colliculus and the very indirect one via lateral geniculate, visual cortex, and thence to colliculus are roughly matched in their collicular "arrival time" (Berson 1988;Waleszczyk et al 1999). In terms of the approach more generally, I would hesitate, however, to rely directly on the more extreme of the time estimates provided by Libet (see Libet et al 1979), on account of the problems encumbering their interpretation (Pockett 2006, provides an entry to this issue).…”

Section: R7 Other Specific Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: A challenge for neuroscience and medicine

Merker¹

2007

Behav Brain Sci

598

529

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain - spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and neurophysiology to clinical data - is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection, action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the vertebrate brain can be seen to form a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain - culminating in the cerebral cortex of mammals - came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity, sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the thalamocortical complex alone.

show abstract

Section: R7 Other Specific Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%