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The neuroscience of consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2014

S Greenfield*
Affiliation:
Royal Institution of Great Britain, University of Oxford and Oxford Centre for the Science of the Mind, Oxford, United Kingdom
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Abstract

Type
Abstracts from ‘Brainwaves’— The Australasian Society for Psychiatric Research Annual Meeting 2006, 6–8 December, Sydney, Australia
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Blackwell Munksgaard

Despite the attempts of physicists and mathematicians to model consciousness in artificial systems, there is a need to understand consciousness in a way that caters for the diverse range of chemicals operating in the brain; how else might one explain the various mood-modifying and consciousness-changing effects of specific drugs? We also need to account for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, and explain how they could arise from the neurochemical context of the holistic brain. In this talk, we shall develop a way of describing consciousness, which on the one hand caters for different momentary states of the physical brain, while at the same time respects the subjective phenomenology that is all too often ignored by scientists. We shall explore a list of properties that would be required of the physical brain, to cater for the subjectivity of consciousness. It might then be possible to test this ‘Rosetta Stone’ model, in various scenarios of everyday life, and see how such scenarios might be interpreted in terms of functioning of the physical brain.