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Responsiveness does not equal consciousness: Can anesthesia or sleep reveal the neural mechanisms of consciousness?| old_uid | 13779 |
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| title | Responsiveness does not equal consciousness: Can anesthesia or sleep reveal the neural mechanisms of consciousness? |
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| start_date | 2017/04/10 |
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| schedule | 12h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Bât. IDEE, Amphithéâtre
Margaux
Hemingway |
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| details | Cycle des conférences 2017 |
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| summary | The explanation of how consciousness emerges from brain activity poses one of greatest challenges to science. It remains unclear what is the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms that are necessary and sufficient for a conscious experience to rise. Being able to reliably and objectively detect the presence of consciousness would have significant implications for clinically relevant populations, especially unresponsive patients who are anesthetized or suffer from disorders of consciousness (such as coma, vegetative state, minimally conscious state or locked -in syndrome). While unresponsive subjects, such as sleeping persons, anesthetized patients, or people suffering from disorders of consciousness seem clinically “unconscious”, they may dream suggesting a state of being unresponsive and conscious but disconnected from the environment. Another possibility is that they may have experiences that are related to the environment (such as awareness during anesthesia or in total locked -in syndrome), but they cannot communicate their state of awareness. They are unresponsive but conscious and connected . The difficulty of distinguishing consciousness vs. connectedness vs. responsiveness therefore poses a major problem for identifying the neural mechanisms of conscious vs. unconscious state. By using general anesthesia and physiological sleep to modulate the state consciousness, by employing various neurophysiological and brain imaging methods (EEG, PET, fMRI) to measure brain activity, and by assessing the presence and the quality of the content of consciousness with subjective reports within these states, we have aimed to fingerprint the neural correlates of consciousness, and distinguish the state of being conscious and/or connected from unconscious state. In this presentation, I will introduce the “ Conscious Mind” research project, present preliminary findings, and discuss the problems in using third person objective measurements to assess the presence and quality of first person subjective experiences. |
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| responsibles | Béranger |
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