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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Giulio Tononi has a unique approach to consciousness research, combining formal theory with some elegant comparisons of waking consciousness and sleep. Many other researchers focus on neural correlates of consciousness (often abbreviated NCC), that is, the minimal neuronal mechanisms that create some a specific content of consciousness. Often, studies attempt to figure out what changes in the brain when we perceive one thing compared to another. But understanding the contents of consciousness isn’t the big question for me. And I am not convinced the NCC approach can uncover the mechanisms of consciousness per se and what factors change the quality of consciousness. Tononi and his colleagues investigate these broader issues and I tend to think they’re moving in the right direction.
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How does brain activity differ when you are aware of something vs. when you are not? This brief article by Melanie Boly and colleagues reviews this question. These researchers have done some interesting work on brain activity in people in persistent vegetative states, and this paper discusses neural activity associated with self-awareness.
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