A critical assessment of the consciousness by synchrony hypothesis.

The understanding of consciousness has been one of the biggest challenges for cognitive science (e.g. Cosmelli et al., 2007; Crick and Koch, 2003; Seth et al., 2006), and the study of the visual system has been its theoretical and empirical starting point. For instance, the consciousness by synchrony hypothesis postulates neuronal synchronization as the putative mechanism of visual consciousness. In this article, we criticize this idea and the traditional arguments supporting it. First, we present the relation between the consciousness by synchrony hypothesis and the visual binding problem. Then, based on empirical evidence, we analyze the limitations of neuronal synchrony to solve both this specific problem and the more general visual consciousness issue. We end by considering a number of additional problems for the consciousness by synchrony hypothesis.