Consciousness - I

Introduction to Psychology
HUL261, Semester II, 2023-2024

April 25, 2024

 Outline for today
• Definition of consciousness
• Awareness vs. wakefulness
• Consciousness and free will
• Sleep and circadian rhythms
• Neuroscience of consciousness
• Conclusion

2
 Who is conscious?

https://motivationaldiaries.com/11-limitless-life-facts-to-surprise/

Hemi-spatial neglect
Person in a coma

http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/news/sciencepgfrontiersinfo?a
rticleid=138
Purves

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 What is consciousness?
• Defining consciousness is a complex and thorny issue that researchers have
struggled with
• Many philosophers and scientists believe that consciousness, as a subjective state,
is intimately related to the sense of self. However, how do we define what a self is?
And how do we test is something or someone is conscious?
• Some people have used Gordon Gallup’s classic mirror self-recognition test which
tests one’s ability to recognize oneself in a mirror to study consciousness
• In a mirror test, a red sticker is surreptitiously placed on the body, and the subject
must use a mirror to detect this
• Children gain the ability to detect the sticker by use of a mirror, typically between
eighteen and twenty-four months. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and even
dolphins, elephants, and magpies have been said to pass this test, but dogs fail this
test!
https://www.animalcognition.org/2015/04/15/list-of-animals-that-

• So, are dogs not conscious – zombies?

have-passed-the-mirror-test/

• Can you think of any problems with this test?

Dijksterhuis and Aarts; Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2010. 61:467–90; doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100445 4
Graziano; BRAIN 2021: 144; 1281–1283; doi:10.1093/brain/awab046
 Understanding consciousness
• There are two perspectives to understanding how consciousness is generated
• Dualism states that mind and brain are two distinct and separate phenomena, and that conscious experience is
nonphysical and beyond the scope of the physical sciences
• Materialism asserts that both mind and body are physical mediums, and that understanding the physical workings
of the body and brain well enough will lead to an understanding of the mind
• Philosopher David Chalmers described the easy and the hard problems in understanding consciousness
• The easy problems: Those that can be studied by understanding how the brain computes sensory input, e.g., why
do you see an illusion. These can be studied using standard methods of cognitive science
• The hard problems: The hard problems are those that seem to resist those cognitive science methods, e.g., what
is subjective experience? For e.g., try describing ‘nausea’ to someone who has never experience it
• Schooler (2002) suggested that there are three levels of consciousness:
• Non-conscious (unexperienced) – The non-conscious or unconscious dimension of consciousness involves
processing that cannot be accessed, e.g., the internal operations of vision, language, and motor control
• Conscious (experienced) – It means simply aware (of whatever we are experiencing in the moment, our
surroundings, thoughts, etc.)
• Meta-conscious (re-represented) – The third level comes into play whenever we focus conscious attention on our
own state of mind
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 The dimensions of consciousness
• Consciousness may refer to at least two different meanings: wakefulness, a
physiological meaning, and subjective awareness, a more abstract meaning
• Wakefulness describes the degree of consciousness, whereas awareness

(Cognitive function)
relates to contents of consciousness, i.e., the functions mediated by the
cortex, including cognitive abilities such as attention, perception, explicit
memory, language, etc.
• While usually the two are correlated, they are dissociable. In sleepwalking,
there is low awareness but high wakefulness
• Investigation of awareness is complicated by the fact that being aware is not
the same as being self-aware: an animal can be aware of sensory input
without having the integrated sense of a separate self that humans possess
• Thus, simply put, consciousness is the ability to be aware of things. Contents
of consciousness are assumed to be available for verbal report (conscious
access) (Motor function)
• For e.g., if I tell you to notice the position of your legs; perhaps you feel a
pressure here or a pain there. This perception is now conscious. But a second
earlier it was subconscious— accessible but not accessed but it was not
unprocessed. However, conscious access made it accessible to the language
system, attention, etc.
• Most studies do not consider the ‘subjective feeling’ (qualia)
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Elgendi et al (2018) Behav. Sci. 2018, 8, 54; doi:10.3390/bs8060054
 How do we study awareness?
• Subliminal priming – Priming refers to an increased sensitivity to certain
stimuli, resulting from prior exposure to related visual or audio
messages. When the exposure to the stimuli is below the threshold of
perception (presented too quickly or faintly), then subliminal priming is
said to have occurred
• Visual illusions – Illusions are subjective but reproducible. They allow us
to test what happens in the brain when conscious access changes
• Binocular rivalry – It is a phenomenon of visual perception in which
perception alternates between different images presented to each eye.
E.g., if you view the image with red-cyan glasses, the text will alternate
between Red and Blue, and one could test the relevant changes in the
brain

Crick and Koch; seminars in The Neurosciences, Vol 2, 1990: pp 263-275 7

 Interim summary
• Definition of consciousness
• A simple definition of consciousness is the ability to be aware of things.
Contents of consciousness are available for verbal report
• Awareness vs. wakefulness
• Wakefulness describes the degree of motor function, whereas
awareness describes the degree of cognitive function
• Consciousness and free will
• Sleep and circadian rhythms
• Neuroscience of consciousness

8
 Consciousness and free will
• Volition and consciousness have often thought to be intimately linked. We know what we want, and
when we act on what we want, we do so by making a conscious decision
• Volition is also often called the will. The process by which we “decide” to engage in a particular
behavior
• When we make a conscious decision to act – such as to buy a new pair of jeans, to call a friend, or
to order a pizza — it feels as if that conscious decision is the first and foremost cause of the act that
follows
• Libet and colleagues (1983) tested the relationship between volition and consciousness
• Participants had to fixate at the centre of the screen and performed a quick flexion of the wrist, at
any freely chosen time. They had to note the position of the clock spot when he/she first became
aware of the wish or intention to act
• This associated clock time is reported by the subject later, after the trial is completed
• During this they measured the readiness potentials from EEG (a negative deflection over the motor
cortex and thought to reflect intentional movement). Typically this is averaged across multiple trials
• What do you think they would find for conscious decision (how much prior to the action?) and
readiness potential (prior or after to conscious decision and action? And by how much?)

Dijksterhuis and Aarts; Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2010. 61:467–90; doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100445 9
Graziano; BRAIN 2021: 144; 1281–1283; doi:10.1093/brain/awab046c
Libet, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, No. 8–9, 1999, pp. 47–57
 Consciousness and free will
• As expected, conscious decision to act occurred ~250 ms prior to the action
• However, readiness potentials could be identified up to a full second before the
actual movement, clearly demonstrating that the brain started to prepare the
movement long before consciousness became involved! It seems like the
movement was predetermined much before we had the volition!
• Soon and colleagues (2008) extended the findings by Libet and colleagues.
They changed the paradigm in such a way that participants not only chose
when to engage in a specific act, but also which one of two possible acts to
make https://w w w .researchgate.net/figure/Schem atic-of-readiness-potential-in-term s-of-
tim e-in-the-Libets-experim ent-about-the_fig2_333218345

• They replicated Libet’s work and found readiness potentials some time before
participants reported making a conscious decision as to which act to engage in.
More importantly, they found activity predictive of the specific act in the frontal
and parietal cortex up to 10 seconds before the actual act
• These suggest that people become consciously aware of an act only after they
unconsciously decide to engage in it – so do we have no free will?!
Dijksterhuis and Aarts; Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2010. 61:467–90; doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100445
Graziano; BRAIN 2021: 144; 1281–1283; doi:10.1093/brain/awab046c 10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
 Criticisms of this study
• Arguably, the most important problem in interpreting Libet’s findings is that one can contend that the movement still starts
with a conscious decision. After all, the chain of events starts with an experimenter telling participants that they have to
move their finger and, obviously, participants are consciously aware of this instruction. One could conclude that
participants unconsciously decided when to make the actual movement, but not whether to make the movement in the
first place
• Others have speculated that the preceding neural activity reported by Libet may be an artefact of averaging the time of
"will", wherein neural activity does not always precede reported "will"
• Miller and Trevena (2009) suggests that the readiness potential in Libet's experiments doesn't represent a decision to
move, but reflects that the brain is paying attention. In this experiment the classical Libet experiment was modified by
playing an audio tone indicating to volunteers to decide whether to tap a key or not. The researchers found that there
was the same RP signal in both cases, regardless of whether or not volunteers actually elected to tap, which suggests
that the RP signal doesn't indicate that a decision has been made
• Dennett argued that the reported time of conscious awareness is not reported correctly – people have to shift their
attention from their intention to the clock, and that this introduces temporal mismatches between the felt experience of
will and the perceived position of the clock hand. Consistent with this argument, subsequent studies have shown that the
exact numerical value varies depending on attention
• Mele criticizes this design for other reasons. Having attempted the experiment himself, Mele explains that "the
awareness of the intention to move" is an ambiguous feeling at best

Dijksterhuis and Aarts; Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2010. 61:467–90; doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.100445
Graziano; BRAIN 2021: 144; 1281–1283; doi:10.1093/brain/awab046c 11
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ4nwTTmcgs
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 Interim summary
• Definition of consciousness
• A simple definition of consciousness is the ability to be aware of things.
Contents of consciousness are available for verbal report
• Awareness vs. wakefulness
• Wakefulness describes the degree of motor function, whereas
awareness describes the degree of cognitive function
• Consciousness and free will
• Libet’s study showed that brain activity related to a movement started
much earlier than when a person is aware of the decision
• Sleep and circadian rhythms
• Neuroscience of consciousness
13
 Studies of wakefulness
• There are three global wakefulness states:
awake, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep
• These three states are associated with
different levels of conscious experience
• These states are characterized by different
oscillations that can be easily recorded using
EEG and using other biopotentials
• Neural oscillations reflect the rhythmic activity
of populations of neurons in the brain
• Characteristic neural oscillation frequency
bands are delta (1-4 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz),
alpha(8-14 Hz), beta (14-30 Hz), and gamma
(>30 Hz)

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 Stages of Sleep
• Over the first hour after retiring, humans descend into successive stages of sleep
• Initially, during “drowsiness,” the EEG frequency decreases. This is called stage I sleep
• In stage II sleep, where the EEG frequency decrease further, and the amplitude increases with
intermittent high-frequency spike clusters called sleep spindles. Sleep spindles are periodic
bursts of activity at about 10 to 12 Hz that generally last 1-2 seconds and arise from the
interactions between thalamic and cortical neurons
• In stage III sleep, which represents moderate to deep sleep, the number of spindles decreases,
the amplitude of EEG activity increases further and the frequency continues to fall
• In the deepest level of sleep, stage IV sleep, the predominant EEG activity consists of very low
frequency (0.5 to 4 Hz), high-amplitude fluctuations called delta waves.
• Stages III and IV together are known as slow-wave sleep. Slow-wave sleep is usually most
pronounced early in an 8-hour sleep episode. Sleepwalking typically occurs during these stages.
It is more difficult to awaken people from slow-wave sleep
• Sleep stages I–IV are called non-rapid eye movement, or non-REM sleep.
• After this, participants enter rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. EEG activity during REM sleep
are remarkably similar the awake state
• After about 10 minutes in REM sleep, the brain typically cycles back through the four non-REM
sleep stages. On average, four additional periods of REM sleep occur, each having a longer
duration
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 Duration & purpose of sleep
• In adults, sleep duration each night is normally distributed with a mean of
7.5±1.25 hours. However, the duration of daily sleep decreases with age
• Some animals such as rabbits sleep during short intervals that usually
last no more than a few minutes. Shrews, the smallest mammals, hardly
sleep at all. The sleep of dolphins and seals alternates between the two
cerebral hemispheres
• Adaptive theory of sleep suggests that sleep is a product of evolution
• Animals and humans evolved different sleep patterns to avoid being present during their
predators’ normal hunting times, which typically would be at night
• Predators like lions that have very few natural predators themselves and sleep nearly 15
hours a day, whereas animals such as gazelles that are lions’ prey sleep a mere 4 hours
a day, usually in short naps

Tiger
Lion

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 Theories of sleep
• Restorative theory of sleep
• Sleep is necessary to the physical health of the body. During sleep, chemicals
that were used up during the day’s activities are replenished, other chemicals
that were secreted in excess and could become toxic if left in the system are
removed, and cellular damage is repaired
• Sleep might help in memory consolidation
• Sleep might also help clear the metabolic wastes produced by neurons during
wakefulness
• Sleep-deprived rats lose weight despite increased food intake, progressively fail to https://www.livescience.com/cerebrospinal-fluid-washes-sleeping-brain.html
regulate body temperature, and develop infections. Rats completely deprived of sleep
die within a few weeks
• These negative effects are closely related to disruption of NREM sleep
• In humans, lack of sleep leads to impaired memory and reduced cognitive abilities
and, if the deprivation persists, mood swings and, often, hallucinations [The max
duration of staying awake is a little over 11 days]
• Patients with a very rare genetic disorder called fatal familial insomnia die within
several years of onset. This rare disease, which appears in middle age, is
characterized by hallucinations, seizures, loss of motor control, and the inability to
enter a state of deep sleep
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 Regulation of sleep
• Sleep and wakefulness are regulated by a complex interplay of neurotransmitters,
neuropeptides, and hormones released by structures located in the basal forebrain,
hypothalamus, and brainstem
• Most of these neuromodulators come from the brainstem region (a collection of nuclei called
the reticular formation), but their influence is in the thalamus and throughout the cortex
• The overarching controller is our biological clock, the circadian pacemaker: the
suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in the hypothalamus
• The daily (circadian) cycle is controlled by precise biological mechanisms, stimulated by
daylight and darkness, and by eating, activity patterns, sleep habits, and other factors
• Activation of the SCN activates the pineal gland which synthesizes the sleep-promoting
neurohormone melatonin. When secreted into the bloodstream, melatonin modulates neural
activity by interacting with melatonin receptors on neurons in the SCN that in turn influence
the sleep–wake cycle
• Melatonin synthesis increases as light from the environment decreases, reaching a
maximum between 2 and 4 a.m.
• In the elderly, the pineal gland produces less melatonin, perhaps explaining why older
people sleep less at night Pineal
SCN gland
• The SCN is considered to be a “master clock” that governs physiological timing functions
that are synchronized with the sleep–wake cycle, including body temperature, hormone
secretion (e.g., cortisol), blood pressure, and urine output
Wikipedia 21
 Sleepwalking
• Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is a sleep disorder that may involve
Red: More blood flow during sleepwalking than SWS
abnormal movements, behaviors, emotions, perceptions, and dreams Yellow: Lower activity in frontal & parietal areas
• While up to 17% of children may sleepwalk, only 2 - 4 % of adults continue to do so
• Sleepwalking can be triggered by anxiety and emotional distress, fatigue, fever, and
medications, including alcohol. It usually occurs after an abrupt, spontaneous, and
incomplete arousal from NREM sleep in the first third of the sleep period
• Sleepwalkers engage in automatic behaviors and lack conscious awareness or
memory of the event
• Usually the actions are relatively harmless, such as moving objects or walking around
the room, but sleepwalkers may also engage in very complex behaviors such as
cooking or repairing things, or even riding a bike or driving a car!
• It seems that sleep can occur locally in subsets of neural circuitry, which may be
awake only when their processing is required
• During sleepwalking, it appears that half the brain is awake – the cerebellum,
posterior cingulate cortex (important for monitoring functions), and brainstem—while
the cortex, anterior cingulate cortex (important for cognitive control and emotional
regulation), and cerebrum are asleep
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• Sleepwalking violence includes incidents of assault, rape, and murder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fYijlewrdE
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 Interim summary
• Definition of consciousness
• A simple definition of consciousness is the ability to be aware of things. Contents of consciousness
are available for verbal report
• Awareness vs. wakefulness
• Wakefulness describes the degree of motor function, whereas awareness describes the degree of
cognitive function
• Consciousness and free will
• Libet’s study showed that brain activity related to a movement started much earlier than when a
person is aware of the decision
• Sleep and circadian rhythms
• There are three global wakefulness states: awake, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep which are
associated with different levels of conscious experience
• Sleep and wakefulness are regulated by a complex interplay of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides,
and hormones released by structures located in the basal forebrain, hypothalamus, and brainstem
• Neuroscience of consciousness

26
 Neuroscience of consciousness
• Wakefulness requires the functioning of brain stem structures
• Do patients in vegetative state who show only reflex behavior and completely lack cognitive
function, have no brain activity related to conscious experience?
• Owen et al., 2006 put such a patient in the scanner and instructed her to imagine playing a
game of tennis and imagine visiting all the rooms of her house
• Her brain activation was similar to that seen in the healthy controls doing the same task!
• In fact, do we even have a clear definition of the opposite of conscious state i.e., death?
• Current legal definitions generally allow for two types of death: when cardiorespiratory function
stop irreversibly, or when crucial brain functions are lost
• Historically, these have been related: stop the heart, and the brain is dead in minutes. Stop the
entire brain functioning, and the heart stops beating. But medical advances such as modern
ventilators, mean that the two types of death could be separated
• United Kingdom and India, define brain death by focusing on the brain stem, which is
necessary for essential functions such as breathing, swallowing and maintaining a heartbeat
• Some clinicians say that there should be requirement to wait for hours to prove that they
cannot restart heart or brain function
• So, should we wait for all cellular functioning to stop – how would we have organ donations?
• What if we could revive organs after ‘death’? Is it wise or ethical to do so?
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Article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1099-1
Commentary: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01168-9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdDgABEvR1w
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 Conclusions
• Definition of consciousness
• A simple definition of consciousness is the ability to be aware of things. Contents of consciousness are
available for verbal report
• Awareness vs. wakefulness
• Wakefulness describes the degree of motor function, whereas awareness describes the degree of cognitive
function
• Consciousness and free will
• Libet’s study showed that brain activity related to a movement started much earlier than when a person is
aware of the decision
• Sleep and circadian rhythms
• There are three global wakefulness states: awake, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep which are associated
with different levels of conscious experience
• Sleep and wakefulness are regulated by a complex interplay of neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and
hormones released by structures located in the basal forebrain, hypothalamus, and brainstem
• Neuroscience of consciousness

30