Publicaties

This article addresses some open questions about the self, development, consciousness and memory, especially episodic memory, and is meant to make an attempt to clarify on a descriptive manner these phenomena and especially the relationship between them. In particular, cognitive child development of memory and current theorizing on semantic and episodic memory and related developmental states of consciousness teaches us here to see how different ...

Based on an interdisciplinary perspective, we discuss how primary-process, anoetic forms of consciousness emerge into higher forms of awareness such as knowledge-based episodic knowing self-aware forms of higher-order consciousness like autonoetic awareness. Anoetic consciousness is defined as the rudimentary state of raw affective, homeostatic and sensory-perceptual mental experiences, which we surely share with other, evolutionarily related ...

In recent years there has been a expansion of scientific work on consciousness. However, there is an increasing necessity to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives and to bring affective feelings more centrally into the overall discussion. Pursuant especially to the theorizing of Endel Tulving (2004, 2005), we look at the phenomena starting from primary-process consciousness, namely the rudimentary state of autonomic awakeness or unknowing ...

Despite the absence of responsiveness during anesthesia, conscious experience may persist. However, reliable, easily acquirable and interpretable neurophysiological markers of the presence of consciousness in unresponsive states are still missing. A promising marker is based on the decay-rate of the power spectral density (PSD) of the resting EEG. We acquired resting electroencephalogram (EEG) in three groups of healthy participants (n = 5 ...

© 2016 Fundación Universitaria Konrad Lorenz This review presents data about an emerging concept called «Consciousness of others» in Alzheimer's disease and behavioural variant fronto-temporal dementia. Consciousness of others is the awareness that one has of others, and it could be considered key in the understanding of behavioural problems in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease and fronto-temporal dementia. Consciousness of ...

A computational theory of consciousness should include a quantitative measure of consciousness, or MoC, that (i) would reveal to what extent a given system is conscious, (ii) would make it possible to compare not only different systems, but also the same system at different times, and (iii) would be graded, because so is consciousness. However, unless its design is properly constrained, such an MoC gives rise to what we call the boundary ...

Continuous sedation at the end-of-life is a practice that has attracted much attention. An increasing number of guidelines on the proposed correct performance of the practice have been drafted. All guidelines stress the importance of using sedation proportionally to the severity of the symptoms the patient is suffering from, and thus to reduce the patientU+2019s consciousness no more than is absolutely necessary. As different patients can have ...

We strongly believe that high levels of conceptual consciousness are impossible without embodiment, and that therefore any idea that consciousness could transcend the physicality of life is mistaken. The derivation of consciousness from lower more localized forms of awareness poses a more pragmatic question: why, from a high level of consciousness, are we apparently unaware of these lower awarenesses? The adoption of a carrier-plus-signal ...

The evaluation of the level of consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) is primarily based on behavioural assessments. Patients with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) do not show any sign of awareness of their environment, while minimally conscious state (MCS) patients show reproducible but fluctuating signs of awareness. Some patients, although with remaining cognitive abilities, are not able to exhibit overt ...

The problem of perceptual consciousness-the question of how our subjective experiences (colours as we see them; sounds as we hear them; tastes, etc., as we feel them) could be accounted for in terms of brain processes-is often regarded as the greatest unsolved mystery of our times. In recent literature, one of the most pressing questions in this regard is whether the neural basis of perceptual consciousness is independent of the neural basis of ...