Project description
Understanding human consciousness through neurobiology, neuroscience and psychology
Funded by the European Research Council, the HUMANCONSCIOUSNESS project will study human consciousness through the prism of neurobiology, neuroscience and psychology. By combining neuroimaging techniques, pharmacological interventions and computational modelling, the project will explore the role of neurotransmitters in conscious experience. It will also check how arousal and physical activity influence subjective experience and how predictions and sensory input interact to shape consciousness. The project aims to provide an integrative framework for understanding consciousness’s neural and biochemical mechanisms and how consciousness is shaped by human interaction with the environment. HUMANCONSCIOUSNESS will deepen our understanding of consciousness and impact fields such as psychology, neurobiology and medicine.
Objective
Consciousness is subjective experience, the ‘what it is likeness’, for example to perceive a certain scene or to feel joy. In the last three decades tremendous progress has been made in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness at the level of whole brain regions. Meanwhile, outside the field of consciousness, rapid progress has been made in understanding neural, biochemical and psychological factors that have to be accounted for to further understand human consciousness. Most importantly, we know much more about the neurotransmitter systems underlying basic sensory processes in animals (e.g. neurobiology), the mechanisms responsible for fluctuations in wakefulness and arousal (e.g. anesthetics/neurobiology), and how perception is constructed by the brain’s predictions about regularities in the world (e.g. neuroscience/psychology). This research has, however, been performed in relative isolation from studies of human consciousness and clear opportunities to link these different fields remain largely unexplored. Here I will establish this crucial link by combining state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques with pharmacological interventions and computational modelling in humans performing novel experimental tasks gauging subjective perceptual experience. My project has 3 main aims. I will first test the hypothesis that excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters play central, albeit different roles in recurrent neural processes, crucial for conscious experience. Second, I will test how subjective experience is shaped by spontaneous fluctuations in arousal and levels of physical activity. Third, I will test how conscious experience is modulated by the interplay between predictions and sensory input. This research promises to provide an integrative framework for understanding the neural and biochemical mechanisms of consciousness, and will reveal how it is shaped and determined by being a human agent that interacts with, acts in, and predicts its environment.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Host institution
1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands