Cognition seminars

Over the past thirty years or so, cognitive neuroscience has made spectacular progress understanding the biological mechanisms of consciousness. Consciousness science, as this field is now sometimes called, was not only inexistent thirty years ago, but its very name seemed like an oxymoron: how can there be a science of consciousness? And yet, despite this scepticism, we are now equipped with a rich set of sophisticated behavioural paradigms, with an impressive array of techniques making it possible to see the brain in action, and with an ever-growing collection of theories and speculations about the putative biological mechanisms through which information processing becomes conscious. This is all good and fine, even promising, but we also seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, or at least to have forgotten it in the crib: consciousness is not just mechanisms, it’s what it feels like. In other words, while we know thousands of informative studies about access-consciousness, we have little in the way of phenomenal consciousness. But that — what it feels like — is truly what “consciousness” is about. Understanding why it feels like something to be me and nothing (panpsychists notwithstanding) for a stone to be a stone is what the field has always been after. However, while it is relatively easy to study access-consciousness through the contrastive approach applied to reports, it is much less clear how to study phenomenology, its structure and its function. Here, I first overview work on what consciousness does (the "how"). Next, I ask what difference feeling things makes and what function phenomenology might play. I argue that subjective experience has intrinsic value and plays a functional role in everything that we do.

We can perceive aesthetic properties such as beauty and sublimity in artworks, environmental nature and even ordinary life. How about consciousness? Does consciousness have aesthetic properties? If so, what kind of aesthetic properties conscious experiences can have? If conscious experiences can have some kinds of aesthetic properties, how can we appreciate them? These questions constitute "Consciousness Aesthetics". In this talk, I will introduce consciousness aesthetics as a new field of aesthetics and discuss some of such questions.

Abstracts: https://sites.google.com/site/analogylist/analogical-minds-seminar/analogy-and-law-symposium

Rhythmic flashing light, or “Ganzflicker”, can elicit altered states of consciousness and hallucinations, bringing your mind’s eye out into the real world. What do you experience if you have a super mind’s eye, or none at all? In this talk, I will discuss how Ganzflicker has been used to simulate psychedelic experiences, how it can help us predict symptoms of psychosis, and even tap into the neural basis of hallucinations.

Various clinical cases have provided evidence linking cardiovascular, neurological, and psychiatric disorders to changes in the brain-heart interaction. Our recent experimental evidence on patients with disorders of consciousness revealed that observing brain-heart interactions helps to detect residual consciousness, even in patients with absence of behavioral signs of consciousness. Those findings support hypotheses suggesting that visceral activity is involved in the neurobiology of consciousness and sum to the existing evidence in healthy participants in which the neural responses to heartbeats reveal perceptual and self-consciousness. Furthermore, the presence of non-linear, complex, and bidirectional communication between brain and heartbeat dynamics can provide further insights into the physiological state of the patient following severe brain injury. These developments on methodologies to analyze brain-heart interactions open new avenues for understanding neural functioning at a large-scale level, uncovering that peripheral bodily activity can influence brain homeostatic processes, cognition, and behavior.

There are many mysteries in the universe. One of the most significant, often considered the final frontier in science, is understanding how our subjective experience, or consciousness, emerges from the collective action of neurons in biological systems. While substantial progress has been made over the past decades, a unified and widely accepted explanation of the neural mechanisms underpinning consciousness remains elusive. The field is rife with theories that frequently provide contradictory explanations of the phenomenon. To accelerate progress, we have adopted a new model of science: adversarial collaboration in team science. Our goal is to test theories of consciousness in an adversarial setting. Adversarial collaboration offers a unique way to bolster creativity and rigor in scientific research by merging the expertise of teams with diverse viewpoints. Ideally, we aim to harness collective intelligence, embracing various perspectives, to expedite the uncovering of scientific truths. In this talk, I will highlight the effectiveness (and challenges) of this approach using selected case studies, showcasing its potential to counter biases, challenge traditional viewpoints, and foster innovative thought. Through the joint design of experiments, teams incorporate a competitive aspect, ensuring comprehensive exploration of problems. This method underscores the importance of structured conflict and diversity in propelling scientific advancement and innovation.

In the science of consciousness, it’s often assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. I'll (1) argue that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, and (2) develop an analysis of degrees of consciousness. On my view, whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I'll also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees.

Conscious emotional experiences are very rich in their nature, and can encompass anything ranging from the most intense panic when facing immediate threat, to the overwhelming love felt when meeting your newborn. It is then no surprise that capturing all aspects of emotional consciousness, such as intensity, valence, and bodily responses, into one theory has become the topic of much debate. Key questions in the field concern how we can actually measure emotions and which type of experiments can help us distill the neural correlates of emotional consciousness. In this talk I will give a brief overview of theories of emotional consciousness and where they disagree, after which I will dive into the evidence proposed to support these theories. Along the way I will discuss to what extent studying emotional consciousness is ‘special’ and will suggest several tools and experimental contrasts we have at our disposal to further our understanding on this intriguing topic.

Although each of us was once a baby, infant consciousness remains mysterious and there is no received view about when, and in what form, consciousness first emerges. Some theorists defend a ‘late-onset’ view, suggesting that consciousness requires cognitive capacities which are unlikely to be in place before the child’s first birthday at the very earliest. Other theorists defend an ‘early-onset’ account, suggesting that consciousness is likely to be in place at birth (or shortly after) and may even arise during the third trimester. Progress in this field has been difficult, not just because of the challenges associated with procuring the relevant behavioral and neural data, but also because of uncertainty about how best to study consciousness in the absence of the capacity for verbal report or intentional behavior. This review examines both the empirical and methodological progress in this field, arguing that recent research points in favor of early-onset accounts of the emergence of consciousness.

Note the later time in the USA!

Neurofeedback provides a feedback display which is linked with on-going brain activity and thus allows self-regulation of neural activity in specific brain regions associated with certain cognitive functions and is considered a promising tool for clinical interventions. Recent reviews of neurofeedback have stressed the importance of applying the “double-blind” experimental design where critically the patient is unaware of the neurofeedback treatment condition. An important question then becomes; is double-blind even possible? Or are subjects aware of the purposes of the neurofeedback experiment? – this question is related to the issue of how we assess awareness or the absence of awareness to certain information in human subjects. Fortunately, methods have been developed which employ neurofeedback implicitly, where the subject is claimed to have no awareness of experimental purposes when performing the neurofeedback. Implicit neurofeedback is intriguing and controversial because it runs counter to the first neurofeedback study, which showed a link between awareness of being in a certain brain state and control of the neurofeedback-derived brain activity. Claiming that humans are unaware of a specific type of mental content is a notoriously difficult endeavor. For instance, what was long held as wholly unconscious phenomena, such as dreams or subliminal perception, have been overturned by more sensitive measures which show that degrees of awareness can be detected. In this talk, I will discuss whether we will critically examine the claim that we can know for certain that a neurofeedback experiment was performed in an unconscious manner. I will present evidence that in certain neurofeedback experiments such as manipulations of attention, participants display residual degrees of awareness of experimental contingencies to alter their cognition.

We are now clearly entering a new age in our relationship with machines. The power of AI natural language processors and image generators has rapidly exceeded the expectations of even those who developed them. Serious questions are now being asked about the extent to which machines could become — or perhaps already are — sentient or conscious. Do AI machines understand the instructions they are given and the answers they provide? In this talk I will consider the prospects for conscious machines, by which I mean machines that have feelings, know about their own existence, and about ours. I will suggest that the recent focus on information processing in models of consciousness, in which the brain is treated as a kind of digital computer, have mislead us about the nature of consciousness and how it is produced in biological systems. Treating the brain as an energy processing system is more likely to yield answers to these fundamental questions and help us understand how and when machines might become minds.

Repetitive spatiotemporal patterns in resting-state brain activities have been widely observed in various species and regions, such as rat and cat visual cortices. Since they resemble the preceding brain activities during tasks, they are assumed to reflect past experiences embedded in neuronal circuits. Moreover, spatiotemporal patterns involving whole-brain activities may also reflect a process that integrates information distributed over the entire brain, such as motor and visual information. Therefore, revealing such patterns may elucidate how the information is integrated to generate consciousness. In this talk, I will introduce our proposed method to estimate repetitive spatiotemporal patterns from resting-state brain activity data and show the spatiotemporal patterns estimated from human resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data. Our analyses suggest that the patterns involved whole-brain propagating activities that reflected a process to integrate the information distributed over frequencies and networks. I will also introduce our current attempt to reveal signal flows and their roles in the spatiotemporal patterns using a big dataset. - Takeda et al., Estimating repetitive spatiotemporal patterns from resting-state brain activity data. NeuroImage (2016); 133:251-65. - Takeda et al., Whole-brain propagating patterns in human resting-state brain activities. NeuroImage (2021); 245:118711.

Life Perceives is a symposium bringing together scientists and artists for an open exploration of how “perception” can be understood as a phenomenon that does not only belong to humans, or even the so-called “higher organisms”, but exists across the entire spectrum of life in a myriad of forms. The symposium invites leading practitioners from the arts and sciences to present unique insights through short talks, open discussions, and artistic interventions that bring us slightly closer to the life worlds of plants and fungi, microbial communities and immune systems, cuttlefish and crows. What do we mean when we talk about perception in other species? Do other organisms have an experience of the world? Or does our human-centred perspective make understanding other forms of life on their own terms an impossible dream? Whatever your answers to these questions may be, we hope to unsettle them, and leave you more curious than when you arrived.