“Ideas” have always been a core trait of the Bank. Indeed if the Bank was simply a financial intermediary it would barely need a tenth of its staff. The money was seen as the lubricant to move the main product – ideas of what to do, how to do it, who should do it and for whom. However, in its early decades the importance of ideas was implicit. The source of ideas was the knowledge embedded in i...

Although visual consciousness can be manipulated easily (e.g., by visual masking), it is unresolved whether it can be assessed accurately with behavioral measures such as discrimination ability and self-report. Older theories of visual consciousness postulated a sensory threshold and distinguished between subjective and objective thresholds. In contrast, newer theories distinguish among three a...

This paper explores the properties of states of consciousness as they are revealed by the process of state-change or switching. Drawing on examples of state of consciousness transitions in infants, altered states of consciousness, and psychiatric disorders, a number of common principles are derived. These include the observation that states of consciousness are discrete self-organizing patterns...

We maintain that the intelligence of the physician and particularly of the physician engaged in clinical research is above the average of that of the community from which he comes; quite often, nevertheless, when he is presented with the simplest statistical problem, his brain appears to become completely paralysed and he is so self-conscious of the limitations of his knowledge that not only do...

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We review recent research about human subjectivity and self-consciousness that has focused on cognitive psychology and neuroimaging of bodily self-consciousness. Multidisciplinary research on the fields of neurology, cognitive neuroscience and virtual reality opens new avenues to investigate brain mechanisms underlying a fundamental sense of the bodily self. Clinical evidence for the implicatio...

Consciousness has many aspects. These include awareness of the world, feelings of control over one's behaviour and mental state (volition), and the notion of continuing self. Focal (executive) attention is used to control details of our awareness and is thus closely related to volition. Experiments suggest an integrated network of neural areas involved in executive attention. This network is as...