decreased level of consciousness in neonates may result from different etiologies, including rare metabolic and hormonal disorder due to anterior pituitary insufficiency. in this case report, a five-day-old newborn boy was referred to the neonatal intensive care unit of mustafa khomeini hospital of ilam, iran. he had an open anterior fontanel with no history of prenatal and familial diseases. c...

No one did more to draw neuroscientists' attention to the problem of consciousness in the twentieth century than Francis Crick, who may be better known as the co-discoverer (with James Watson) of the structure of DNA. Crick focused his research on visual awareness and based his analysis on the progress made over the last fifty years in uncovering the neural mechanisms underlying visual percepti...

Until recently, most neuroscientists did not regard consciousness as a suitable topic for scientific investigation. This reluctance was based on certain philosophical mistakes, primarily the mistake of supposing that the subjectivity of consciousness made it beyond the reach of an objective science. Once we see that consciousness is a biological phenomenon like any other, then it can be investi...

"Consciousness" is the feeling that each individual has of his own existence (self-awareness) and also the state which permits him to perceive his environment (consciousness and wakefulness). These two types of consciousness, apparently quite different, are in fact the two converging stems of the perceptions that the nervous system provides to the organism. To explain this better, it is necessa...

What is consciousness? Consciousness continues to be an illdefined concept, so I shall start by discussing how the term is used in this special issue. As discussed in Overgaard and Overgaard (2010), there is an important distinction between level of consciousness and content of consciousness. Level of consciousness refers to a dimension that varies from coma at one extreme, through sleep and, a...