| Date | Topic | Description |
|
3.28.07 |
Chapter 1
| Introduction to the Study of
Consciousness Overview of the general guiding principles we will
use to approach consciousness as a phenomenon of the natural world;
what needs to be explained and what should best be left aside for the
moment; my Working Hypothesis as regards the neural correlates
of consciousness (NCC).
Yoram Bonneh's Motion Induced Blindness
Demo (QuickTime) and the paper
that describes this powerful illusion. |
| 3.30.07 | Chapters 3 & 4 |
The Early Visual System From retina to primary
visual cortex. |
| 4.4.07 | Chapter 5 & Laureys (2005)
| When Consciousness
is Gone Enabling factors for consciousness;
coma, persistent vegetative syndrome (PVS), minimal
conscious state (MCS); the evolving definition of death.
|
| 4.6.07 | Chapters 5-7
| The
Architecture of Cortex and the NCC Mapping cortex;
cortex is hierarchical; Felleman-Van Essen hierarchy;
thalamus and cortex; dorsal and ventral pathways; the
neuronal correlates of the content of a specific
conscious percept (NCC);
anesthesia and consciousness; a general strategy for
circumscribing the NCC; neuronal specificity and the
NCC. The NCC are not in primary visual
cortex. |
| 4.11.07 | - |
Western Cultural Representations of Consciousness: A
Historical Perspective By
guest lecturer Prof. Grant Horner. |
| 4.13.07 | Chapter 8 | Beyond Primary Visual Cortex More
topographic, visual cortical areas; color perception; MT
and motion perception; posterior parietal cortex and the
representation of space; inferior temporal cortex and
object recognition. |
| 4.18.07 | Chapter 9 & Koch and Tsuchiya
(2007) | Attention and
Consciousness Different forms of attention; change
blindness; attending to a region, feature or object;
bottom-up versus top-down attention; consciousness and
attention are different processes; the binding problem.
|
| 4.20.07 |
Tsuchiya & Adolphs (2007) |
Consciousness and Emotions
The relationship between emotions and consciousness;
can there be any conscious sensation without some emotions?
Guest lecture by
Prof. Ralph Adolphs.
|
| 4.25.07 | Chapter 12 |
The Zombie Within Non-conscious sensory-motor
systems in everyday life; vision-for-perception is
different from vision-for-action; your zombie acts
faster than you see; nonconscious versus conscious
smell. |
| 4.27.07 | Chapter 13 |
Clinical Evidence for Zombies The notion of
zombie systems in patients: visual agnosia; blindsight;
automatic behaviors in partial complex epileptic
seizures; sleep-walking; what do zombie agents tells us
about the NCC? |
| 5.2.07 | Chapter 14 | The Functions of Consciousness
High-level unconscious processing; Freud's ideas;
how can subjective feelings
matter; meaning and neurons; qualia are symbols; what
does this imply about the location of the NCC?
|
| 5.4.07 | Chapter 11 | Memory and Consciousness The
various forms of memory and their relationship to
consciousness; implicit versus explicit, declarative
memory; prefrontal cortex and working memory; fleeting
memory. |
| 5.9.07 | - |
No class
|
| 5.11.07 | Chapter 15 |
On Time and Consciousness Do conscious percepts
arise gradually; seeing more than one object:
blending, masking and competition; a correlate of
visual consciousness in the frontal eye fields; is
perception discretized in time, like a
movie? |
| 5.16.07 | Chapter
16 | When
the Mind Flips Binocular rivalry and flash
suppression; perceptial suppression or you often don't see
what you're looking
at; neuronal responses to such perceptial stimuli in monkey
inferior temporal cortex and human medial temporal
lobe. |
| 5.18.07
| Chapter 17 | Splitting the Brain Splits
Consciousness Corpus callosum, split-brain patients;
Roger Sperry's work; two distinct hemispheres.
|
| 5.23.07
|
Haggard (2005)
| Free Will Cartesian (libertarian) free
will; what do people mean by 'free will'; Libet's
experiments on the readiness potential; cortical regions
in the percept of willing an action. |
| 5.25.07
| Chapter 19 &
Tononi (2004) | A Framework for Consciousness Tononi's
information theoretical theory of consciousness; a
neuronally-based empirical framework for consciousness.
|
