There’s a nice video conversation with University of California Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë discussing his view of consciousness on the website edge.org.
Roland Zahn and colleagues have published an interesting case report of a person who reportedly lost the implicit knowledge that his perceptions are not his own. Sadly, they do not report any neurocognitive tasks that might provides an objective correlate of the experience.
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Below is Thomas Metzinger’s 2005 Foerster Lecture on the Immortality of the Soul. It’s not new, but it’s very good. Past speakers in this UC Berkeley series have included Aldous Huxley, G. E. M. Anscombe, and Thomas Kuhn. Sadly, they weren’t videotaping back then. But at least we have this wonderful lecture (as well as Christof Koch’s talk given the following year). Metzinger’s lecture was called “Being No One: Consciousness, The Phenomenal Self, and First-Person Perspective.” In it, he presents ideas from his excellent book On Being No One, which I see as a scientifically and philosophically sophisticated synthesis of Western and Buddhist theories of consciousness. (The talk was about an hour long and is divided into six videos.)
Perceptual rivalry is one of the neatest ways to study the neural correlates of the contents of consciousness. If you’re not familiar with this phenomenon, you can read Olivia Carter’s online tutorial on binocular rivalry, one commonly studied type of perceptual rivalry. (There’s also some nice images in a Figure from Blake & Logothetis’ 2002 Nature Reviews Neuroscience article here).
Perceptual rivalry should fascinate anyone with an interest in consciousness research. It is also a rare area where scientific studies of consciousness and hallucinogens converge. Carter has done groundbreaking studies (links below) of how psilocybin and possibly LSD affect perceptual rivalry, including some research using the amazing phenomenon of motion-induced blindness (demo here), my favorite visual illusion. Carter’s research is consistently inspiring: She uses rigorous quantitative tools to measure the effects of pharmacological manipulations on consciousness. Her work is one reason I consider perceptual rivalry among the most interesting directions to pursue in future human hallucinogen research, even if (as Carter and Dittrich’s data suggest) hallucinogens do not affect rivalry through a 5-HT2A mechanism.
Two noteworthy developments in non-hallucinogenic rivalry research are a paper by Jakob Hohwy and colleagues giving an elegant theory for why rivalry occurs and a great paper by Joel Pearson and colleagues showing that mental imagery influences rivalry.
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John Cage wrote, “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
If anything should have a claim as the most boring thing in the world, it’s a sleeping pill; they’re designed to put you to sleep. But zolpidem (trade name Ambien), apparently the best selling prescription sleeping aid in the U.S., is anything but boring.
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Melita Giummarra et al. have a very nice new review that gives me an excuse to revisit some older papers coauthored by Olaf Blanke. Blanke is one of a small number of researchers who completely blew my mind when I entered grad school and started reading the literature on neurological disorders of perception. It would be an understatement to say he and his collaborators address some fascinating areas.
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Mostly I am trying to post about new articles, but I came across this interesting passage from a 2005 article while continuing my epilepsy and consciousness reading.
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I don’t see Pekala’s self-report Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory (PCI) get used all that often, despite it being an interesting and useful questionnaire. Here the authors used it to measure consciousness changes during partial seizures. Among other things, they find individuals with partial seizure have consistent phenomenology during different seizure episodes.
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