Conscious experience is fluid; it rarely remains on one topic for an extended period without deviation. Its dynamic nature is illustrated by the experience of mind wandering, in which attention switches from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Studies exploring the phenomenology of mind wandering highlight the importance of its content and relation to meta-cognition in determinin...

This article reviews three experiments on event-related potentials (ERPs) testing the hypothesis that primary visual consciousness (stimulus self-report) is related to enhanced cortical neural synchronization as a function of stimulus features. ERP peak latency and sources were compared between "seen" trials and "not seen" trials, respectively related and unrelated to the primary visual conscio...

While questions of a functional localization of consciousness in the brain have been the subject of myriad studies, the idea of a temporal access code as a specific brain mechanism for consciousness has remained a neglected possibility. Dresp-Langley and Durup (2009; 2012) proposed a theoretical approach in terms of a temporal access mechanism for consciousness based on its two universally reco...

At rest, the brain is traversed by spontaneous functional connectivity patterns. Two hypotheses have been proposed for their origins: they may reflect a continuous stream of ongoing cognitive processes as well as random fluctuations shaped by a fixed anatomical connectivity matrix. Here we show that both sources contribute to the shaping of resting-state networks, yet with distinct contribution...

Fifteen Central Australian Aboriginal adults (8 patients, 7 colleagues) were presented with a culturally modified version of Flavell's 'stream of consciousness' experiment (pictures of persons with empty or 'busy' thought-bubbles, and an invitation to assign a picture to the mental state of a second experimenter seen reading or sitting quietly). Only 4 people assigned the empty thought bubble t...

Virginia Woolf, one of the prominent representatives of modernist novelist in England, has contributed significantly to the development of modern novel in both theory and practice. She abandoned traditional fictional devices and formulated her own distinctive techniques. The novels of Woolf tend to be less concerned with outward reality than with the inner life. Her masterpiece, To the Lighthou...

The quest for the neural correlates of consciousness has led to controversial results. When contrasting consciously seen versus unseen stimuli, some authors have proposed that consciousness is related to activity in visual areas along the ventral cortical visual stream, while others propose the implication of parietal and frontal regions ( Dehaene and Changeux 2011). When invisibility is caused...

Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns are consisten with it. Here we show, by means of a simple gedankenexperiment that this has an importan logic consequence: any scenario involving the transien...