Author Archive
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“The Illusion of Conscious Will”, by DM Wegner
Reviewed by Thomas W. ClarkIn neuroscientific circles, it is simply commonsense physicalism that the brain conducts business on its own. It doesn’t need a further, non-physical agent to orchestrate the dauntingly complex oper...
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Empty mind — a brain disorder?
A French neurological team has described a surprising new brain disorder — a deficit of spontaneous conscious thinking. LaPlane and Dubois describe it as “auto-activation deficit.” (*) People with this problem lose sp...
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The brain basis of a “consciousness monitor”
Imagine that you are anesthesized before a surgical operation. You would probably expect to “black out,” and then wake up some time afterward. What then if you suddenly found yourself conscious of the surgeon’s knife ...
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Pain Resources
In the recent Webscan on HMS Beagle, Cindy Siewert localizes some of the web resources for the present knowledge on pain and related issues. Some of the features are links to brain scans of subjects in both chronic and acute pa...
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Subliminal sights educate brain
You must pay attention to learn, teachers say. Not necessarily, US psychologists now argue: sights we are unaware of can have a lasting impact on our brains. Subliminal training can improve our ability to see moving dots, Takeo...
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Consciousness & Cognition, 10 (3)
Selected articles: Confidence and Accuracy of Near-Threshold Discrimination Responses Craig Kunimoto, Jeff Miller, Harold Pashler This article reports four subliminal perception experiments using the relationship between confid...
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Sensations’s ghost. The non-sensory “fringe” of consciousness
PSYCHE: an interdisciplinary journal of research on consciousness PSYCHE 7 (18) Non-sensory experiences represent almost all context information in consciousness. They condition most aspects of conscious cognition including vol...
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Brain Scans Show Deaf Subjects ‘Hear’ Vibrations
Deaf people use the region of the brain associated with hearing to sense vibrations, a new study shows. “These findings illustrate how altered experience can affect brain organization,” says investigator Dean Shibat...
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International Journal of Psychopysiology
Thalamo-cortical relations in attention and consciousness. C.H.M. Brunia – Attention, consciousness, and electrical wave activity within the cortical column D. LaBerge The present issue of the International Journal of Psy...
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The conscious access hypothesis: origins and recent evidence
Consciousness might help to mobilize and integrate brain functions that are otherwise separate and independent. Evidence for this ‘conscious access hypothesis’ was described almost two decades ago, in a framework ca...