Neural Basis of Consciousness

Abstract

Consciousness appears to be the most singular challenge to the scientific, reductionist worldview. In the closing years of the second millennium, advances in the ability to record the activity of individual neurons in the brains of monkeys or other animals while they carry out particular tasks, combined with the explosive development of functional brain imaging in normal humans, led to a renewed empirical program to discover the scientific explanation of consciousness. This entry reviews some of the relevant experimental work and argues that the most advantageous strategy for now is to focus on discovering the neuronal correlates of consciousness.

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