Publications related to Stream of consciousness

Thought consciousness and source monitoring depend on robotically-controlled sensorimotor conflicts and illusory states

Olaf Blanke, Hannes Bleuler, Fosco Bernasconi, Herberto Dhanis Pedro De Barros Camacho, Andrea Serino, Roy Salomon, Giulio Rognini, Masayuki Hara, Marco Solcà, Giedre Stripeikyte, Polona Pozeg, Pierre Progin

Thought insertion (TI) is characterized by the experience that certain thoughts, occurring in one’s mind, are not one’s own, but the thoughts of somebody else and suggestive of a psychotic disorder. We report a robotics-based method able to investigate the ...

2020

Postural Control and Consciousness and Their Applications to Lower-Limb Exoskeletons

Jemina Fasola

Human postural control requires high coordination and is distributed over the whole musculoskeletal and nervous systems. Hence, postural balance can be impaired due to various pathologies. Efficient rehabilitation programs and technological solutions are t ...

EPFL2020

Peri-personal space encoding in patients with disorders of consciousness and cognitive-motor dissociation

José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Serafeim Perdikis, Maria Manuela da Silva Marques, Andrea Serino, Jean-Paul Noel

Behavioral assessments of consciousness based on overt command following cannot differentiate patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) from those who demonstrate a dissociation between intent/awareness and motor capacity: cognitive motor dissociation ...

2019

The unfolding argument: Why IIT and other causal structure theories cannot explain consciousness

Michael Herzog, Kathryn Hess Bellwald, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Aaron Schurger

How can we explain consciousness? This question has become a vibrant topic of neuroscience research in recent decades. A large body of empirical results has been accumulated, and many theories have been proposed. Certain theories suggest that consciousness ...

2019

Multisensory perceptual awareness: Categorical or graded?

Olaf Blanke, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Jean-Paul Noel

Neural evidence suggests that mechanisms associated with conscious access (i.e., the ability to report on a conscious state) are “all-or-none”. Upon crossing some threshold, neural signals are globally broadcast throughout the brain and allow conscious rep ...

2019

Spatiotemporal feature integration within discrete time windows provides evidence for discrete perception

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Leila Drissi Daoudi - Kleinbauer

Intuitively, consciousness seems to be a continuous stream of percepts. Here, contrary to intuition, we show evidence for discrete consciousness, occurring only at certain moments of time. We presented a Vernier followed by a sequence of flanking lines on ...

2018

The Unfolding Argument: Why Recurrent Processing Cannot Explain Consciousness

Michael Herzog, Aaron Schurger, Adrien Christophe Doerig

Neuroscientific theories aim to explain paradigm cases of consciousness such as masking, binocular rivalry or the transition from dreamless sleep to wakefulness. The most popular theories are based on computational principles. Recurrent processing is a key ...

2018

Distinct locomotor control and awareness in awake sleepwalkers

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape

Sleepwalkers’ complex nocturnal behaviors have inspired fictional characters from Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth to Polidori’s Vampyre to Cesare, the homicidal somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Yet although the underlying pathophysiology of sleepwalk ...

Elsevier2017

Consciousness is more than meets the eye: a call for a multisensory study of subjective experience

Roy Salomon, Nathan Quentin Faivre

Over the last 30 years, our understanding of the neurocognitive bases of consciousness has improved, mostly through studies employing vision. While studying consciousness in the visual modality presents clear advantages, we believe that a comprehensive sci ...

Oxford University Press (OUP)2017

The Complex Interplay Between Multisensory Integration and Perceptual Awareness

Nathan Quentin Faivre

The integration of information has been considered a hallmark of human consciousness, as it requires information being globally available via widespread neural interactions. Yet the complex interdependencies between multisensory integration and perceptual ...

Brill Academic Publishers2016

Mandatory feature integration across retinotopic locations

Michael Herzog, Leila Drissi Daoudi - Kleinbauer

Although visual integration is often thought to be retinotopic, visual features can be integrated across retinotopic locations. For example, when a Vernier is followed by a sequence of flanking lines on either side, a percept of two diverging motion stream ...

2016

An invisible touch: Body-related multisensory conflicts modulate visual consciousness

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Javier Bello Ruiz, Marta Lukowska

The majority of scientific studies on consciousness have focused on vision, exploring the cognitive and neural mechanisms of conscious access to visual stimuli. In parallel, studies on bodily consciousness have revealed that bodily (i.e. tactile, proprioce ...

Elsevier2016

Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?

Michael Herzog, Frank Scharnowski

We experience the world as a seamless stream of percepts. However, intriguing illusions and recent experiments suggest that the world is not continuously translated into conscious perception. Instead, perception seems to operate in a discrete manner, just ...

Public Library of Science2016

Visual consciousness and bodily self-consciousness

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Nathan Quentin Faivre

Purpose of review: In recent years, consciousness has become a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. This review focuses on the relation between bodily self-consciousness - the feeling of being a subject in a body - and visual consciousness - the subjec ...

Lippincott Williams & Wilkins2015

Breathing and sense of self: Visuo-respiratory conflicts alter body self-consciousness (Reprint from Respiratory Physiology & Neurobiology, vol 203, pg 68-74)

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin

Bodily self-consciousness depends on the processing of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals. It can be disrupted by inducing signal conflicts. Breathing, at the crossroad between interoception and exteroception, should contribute to bodily self-consciou ...

Elsevier2014

Breathing and sense of self: Visuo-respiratory conflicts alter body self-consciousness

Olaf Blanke, Bruno Herbelin

Bodily self-consciousness depends on the processing of interoceptive and exteroceptive signals. It can be disrupted by inducing signal conflicts. Breathing, at the crossroad between interoception and exteroception, should contribute to bodily self-consciou ...

Elsevier Science Bv2014

Full body illusion is associated with widespread skin temperature reduction

Olaf Blanke, Roy Salomon, Roger Gassert, Christian Pfeiffer, Mei Ling Melanie Lim

A central feature of our consciousness is the experience of the self as a unified entity residing in a physical body, termed bodily self-consciousness. This phenomenon includes aspects such as the sense of owning a body (also known as body ownership) and h ...

Frontiers Research Foundation2013

Sleep paralysis in narcolepsy: more than just a motor dissociative phenomenon?

Francesco Manni

Sleep paralyses are viewed as pure motor phenomena featured by a dissociated state in which REM-related muscle atonia coexists with a wakefulness state of full consciousness. We present a 59-year-old man diagnosed with narcolepsy experiencing sleep paralys ...

2012

Consciousness & the Small Network Argument

Michael Herzog, Wulfram Gerstner

The last decade has experienced a vivid enthusiasm to unravel the mystery of consciousness believed to be one of the major puzzles of humankind. We share this enthusiasm. Still,we feel that current models are incomplete suffering from a problem that we cal ...

Elsevier2007