Conference in French on Recent progress in understanding consciousness and its disorders
by Stanislas Dehaene
11 September 2017 - 11 September 2017
France
Place : Maison de l'AX, 5 rue Descartes, F-75005 Paris, France
Date : September 11, 2017
Time : 17:00
Abstract
Considerable progress has been made in understanding how brain activity leads to a conscious experience. Following the approach described in my recent book “Consciousness and the brain”, I will show how a combination of visual illusions, subjective reports, and advances in machine learning allow us to decode the time course of subliminal images from brain signals and to identify the moment when conscious perception first emerges. By creating minimal contrasts in which the very same visual stimulus is sometimes undetected, and sometimes consciously seen, we can identify cerebral signatures of consciousness. The results show that conscious access relates to a global burst of late synchronised activity (a cortical “ignition”), distributed through many cortical areas, and with strong inter-areal communication across distant cortical sites. I will demonstrate new applications of these signatures of consciousness to (1) track dual-task delays and attentional blink; (2) analyse resting-state activity in awake and anesthetised brains; (3) determine whether patients recovering from coma have recovered or will recover consciousness.
References :
Stanislas Dehaene, Le Code de la Conscience, Odile Jacob, Sciences, 2014, 432 pp.
Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain, Viking Penguin, 2014, 333pp.
Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing, Neuron Review 70 (2011), 200--227.
Stanislas Dehaene et al., Toward a computational theory of conscious processing, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 25 (2014), 76--84.
Date : September 11, 2017
Time : 17:00
Abstract
Considerable progress has been made in understanding how brain activity leads to a conscious experience. Following the approach described in my recent book “Consciousness and the brain”, I will show how a combination of visual illusions, subjective reports, and advances in machine learning allow us to decode the time course of subliminal images from brain signals and to identify the moment when conscious perception first emerges. By creating minimal contrasts in which the very same visual stimulus is sometimes undetected, and sometimes consciously seen, we can identify cerebral signatures of consciousness. The results show that conscious access relates to a global burst of late synchronised activity (a cortical “ignition”), distributed through many cortical areas, and with strong inter-areal communication across distant cortical sites. I will demonstrate new applications of these signatures of consciousness to (1) track dual-task delays and attentional blink; (2) analyse resting-state activity in awake and anesthetised brains; (3) determine whether patients recovering from coma have recovered or will recover consciousness.
References :
Stanislas Dehaene, Le Code de la Conscience, Odile Jacob, Sciences, 2014, 432 pp.
Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain, Viking Penguin, 2014, 333pp.
Stanislas Dehaene and Jean-Pierre Changeux, Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Conscious Processing, Neuron Review 70 (2011), 200--227.
Stanislas Dehaene et al., Toward a computational theory of conscious processing, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 25 (2014), 76--84.
Keywords
brain activity, consciousness