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Researchers Shed New Light on Consciousness
February 19, 2008 at 5:45 PM
Research News
Dr Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, a bioengineer at the University of Leicester who is spearheading the research, says that the study is opening new possibilities of exploring a hitherto relatively unchartered scientific area.
There has been much interest in recent years in consciousness, which is considered by many as one of the major scientific challenges to be solved, or at least addressed in a scientific -rather than just philosophical- way, Dr Quian Quiroga said.
While revealing the process involved in the study, Dr Quian Quiroga said: Recordings were done in epileptic patients candidates of curative surgery in which intracranial electrodes are implanted to establish the location of the epileptic focus and evaluate the potential outcome of the surgery. Patients usually stay for 1 or 2 weeks in the guard and this gives us the extraordinary opportunity to perform experiments and study how neurons in the human brain respond to different perceptual and behavioural tasks.
In this particular study we showed pictures in a computer screen very briefly, at the threshold of conscious recognition. Subjects had to report whether they recognized or not the particular picture showed in each trial. The key point is that, since the pictures are shown very briefly, for exactly the same visual input sometimes the subjects reported recognizing the picture and sometimes not recognizing it. Then we could ask whether the neurons fire according to the subjects' conscious perception or the actual visual inputs, he said.
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