Consciousness is one of the most difficult challenges both science and philosophy face. Recently, neuroscience has witnessed many developments that provide novel pictures of the neural correlates of consciousness; these unique opportunities have given insights into the mechanisms that are relevant to subjective experience. Prof. Joseph Neisser’s review article, ” Neural Correlates of Consciousness Reconsidered”, represents a thorough synthesis of these exciting territories. This article involves neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy to disentangle the mysteries of consciousness, observing the meaning of interdisciplinary collaborations. This is of utmost importance regarding the progress on the subject matter of the human mind. This article is fascinating for me because of its careful explanation of how a neuroscience attitude is possible with the help of the latest research techniques related to the activity of brains and conscious experience, and for me, an interdisciplinary point of view is crucial to understanding the factors which contribute to human understanding.
Analysis
In his review, Prof. Joseph Neisser turns to the surveillance of an intricate consciousness landscape, getting more into details of the latest discoveries about the neural correlates of consciousness. The examination of Nureyev’s Combined Cognition NCC excites me because it is a field across multiple disciplines, namely neuroscience, psychology and philosophy. Given the complexity with which consciousness arises, diverse perspectives or a multidisciplinary approach is often necessary to unravel its mysteries and to appreciate it the way it should be appreciated. The aspect which I found the most interesting in the article is its use of IIT (Integrated Information Theory) along with Nureyev’s Combined Cognition (Neisser, 2012). It states that brain activity associated with conscious thinking is a process of integrating data within the brain. It also takes into account the amount and the quality of information processing. This article centres on a neuroimaging exploration recently conducted and based on the IIT principles. That study identified specific areas of the brain and networks associated with conscious awareness. The philosophical and empirical components complement one another thus giving credence to the notion that merging philosophical inquiry with scientific research is essential when studying consciousness.
Besides, the article is concerned with a consciousness conceived as a global workspace, which is compared to a pattern of brain activity as well as the way information is processed by these complex systems. This viewpoint ties up with my idea that consciousness is a dynamic and distributed phenomenon in which the different neural networks cooperate to produce the mental that is the substrate of our phenomenology. By explaining how neural activity spreads from one connected brain area to another as it gives rise to conscious awareness, researchers will get vital facts about how the different cognitive processes arise from the brain. It is also worth noting that the article delineates such peculiar states of consciousness that occur using psychedelics or various kinds of meditations (Neisser, 2012). By tracking how these states shift the dynamics of neural activity and break the usual flow of information, scientists will manage to add the missing link in the puzzle of understanding the neural basis of our consciousness. How these altered conditions are explored undeniably challenges the time-honoured perceptions of a compact and uniform self, thus directing light on the fluidity and plasticity of experience. Moreover, the article takes into account attention as one of the factors on the road to conscious perception. It even goes onto describe how selective attention, as a powerful mechanism, works by filtering sensory information to then prioritize and focus on the relevant stimuli as a remarkable step in the process of conscious perception. At the same time, bottom-up sensory input joins the top-down cognitive control in the process of perception; it seems obvious that the reality we perceive subjectively is not an absolute one but is in some way dependent on our mental activity.
Conclusion
Prof. Joseph Neisser exposes how neural correlates of consciousness are currently researched and, by revealing crucial contributors, demonstrates how they finally become conscious awareness. Using different theories, the researchers will be able to incorporate data from different fields of enquiry. As a result, the study of the mysterious concept of consciousness will continue and other ways of understanding it now may be revealed. While reflecting upon the publication, I realize that neural traffic is the basis of our awareness, and if the approaches of different scientists are not merged, we will never figure it out. The intersection of disciplinary knowledge during the study of an ontologically intractable phenomenon has been considered vitally important. The field of consciousness, as well as philosophy, psychology, brain science and even physics, is addressed from different points of view, promoting rich exchange of ideas and various approaches. Not only, but also high level of technology has created a new toolkit for neuroimaging techniques and computational models, which in turn provides information about the neuronal mechanisms responsible for the states of consciousness that probably will bring us new findings and revelations about how the human mind is working fundamentally.
Reference
Neisser, J. (2012, June). Neural Correlates of Consciousness Reconsidered. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(2), 681–690. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2011.03.012
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