William James postulated a "stream of consciousness" that presupposes temporal continuity. The neuronal mechanisms underlying the construction of such temporal continuity remain unclear, however, in my contribution, I propose a neuro-phenomenal hypothesis that is based on slow cortical potentials and their extension of the present moment as described in the phenomenal term of "width of present"...

We formulate and study a quantum field theory of a microtubule, a basic element of living cells. Following the quantum theory of consciousness by Hameroff and Penrose, we let the system to reduce to one of the classical states without measurement if certain conditions are satisfied(self-reductions), and calculate the self-reduction time τN (the mean interval between two successive self-reductio...

Science has rendered the matter and spirit conceptual framework obsolete. This paper advocates its replacement with structure (what we can understand through science) and essence (what we experience in stream of consciousness). The Totality Axiom is introduced to integrate structure and essence and thus provide a starting point for integrating scientific understanding with spiritual intuition. ...

Many scientists have until recently considered consciousness to be unsuitable for scientific research. As Damasio remarks, ‘studying consciousness was simply not the thing to do before you made tenure, and even after you did it was looked upon with suspicion’ (Damasio, 1999, p. 7). Prompted by technological developments as well as conceptual changes, this attitude has changed within the last de...

Spontaneous thoughts can arise from past memories, future tasks, and environmental cues. We developed a paradigm to investigate the stream of consciousness leading to spontaneous thoughts. While performing a concentration exercise (9 min) requiring one to focus only on one’s breathing, subjects observed spontaneous thoughts and counted the number of cognitions/percepts (‘links’) that they belie...

background: this study aimed to identify factors contributing to the creation of intellectual capital in the organization of education. the research method is a descriptive and exploratory factor analysis method. a sample: directors and deputies of the second period secondary education department of tehran province. based on stratified random sampling method and based on a sample of 500 was cal...

During sleep, consciousness is reduced, associated with a diminished connection of the brain to the environment. This is due to the blocking of the thalamocortical pathway by inhibitory mechanisms. This “thalamic gating” during sleep, however, is not complete, but partial. The stream of information is considerably reduced, but the brain is not fully disconnected from the environment. An inspect...

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust s theory of conscious experience and sh...

Milner and Goodale's (1995) model of the primate cortical visual system has been justly influential in shaping recent empirical and theoretical work on the neural basis of conscious vision. In this commentary I examine the extent to which their model accounts for recent neuropsychological findings from patients with visual neglect and extinction, two profound disorders of visual consciousness t...

the purpose of this study was to determine the effect of a guided family visiting, as an auditory and tactile stimulation, on the consciousness level of comatose head injury patients. a randomized controlled trial design was used. sixty-four comatose head injury patients were randomly allocated into a control group or an intervention group. patients in the intervention group were received audit...