Lectures
From CNS120
Lectures will be held on Wednesday and Friday from 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm in the main lecture theater (Room 100) in the Broad building. The lectures start at 2:00 and not at 2:10 or later. Please be on time.
All lectures will be given by Prof. Christof Koch, following his book "The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach". He will be available for questions after each class.
If you have questions about specific terms used in class, please consult this glossary.
If you missed one of the lectures, you can see a video from 2003 taught by Professor Koch or download his slides here (password required to download slides).
| Date | Topic | Description | Slides |
| 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. | ppt |
| 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 & 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 perceptual 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. |
