Welcome

Welcome to the Course!

In a very long tradition, we salute the conscious self in you from our own conscious selves.

Sensory consciousness is profoundly embedded in biology, anatomy, physiology, and above all, in adaptive brain functions that serve us in every second of waking life. 

This is not some philosophical speculation. It is now supported by numerous empirical findings published in peer-reviewed journals that are easily found in web archives. How can we understand the evidence?

Consciousness is a fundamental concept, like mass and energy, entropy and life. Scientists can’t avoid it, so we use any number of pseudonyms. People call it “perception” or “attention” or even “knowledge.” Those terms capture part of the truth, but they are by no means the whole network of empirically anchored concepts.

The empirical anchors of conscious events are emerging even today, with some real progress on cortical markers for conscious events that are comparable to experimentally matched unconscious ones. This is an emerging field, but it is being developed in a very reliable way by excellent researchers.

Consciousness is a part of nature, and we now have clear evidence about the “organ of the conscious mind,” the cerebral cortex, which fills 80 percent of the cranial volume. Broadly, sensory perception is conscious, while “stored memory traces” are not. Endogenous senses like inner speech and visual imagery are also conscious, perhaps more vividly in children.

The most revealing studies compare matched conscious and unconscious conditions, aka “contrastive analysis,” and that has allowed us to pinpoint the location and processes that give rise to visual consciousness, for instance. The conditions that are compared includes waking vs. sleep, waking vs. coma, but, also, conscious and unconscious events within the waking state. Right now, you are conscious of the words you see, but there are many, many unconscious processes happening at the same time to help you understand the grammar of this sentence. So we always compare something that is conscious to something that is not. This whole body of evidence is also transforming the study of “disorders of consciousness” in medicine.

We hope you enjoy these seminars, and we also hope these course lessons will help to clarify the evidence about the conscious brain.