I have taken an experimental approach to this question. Freely voluntary acts are preceded by a specific electrical change in the brain (the ‘readiness potential’, RP) that begins 550 ms before the act. Human subjects became aware of intention to act 350–400 ms after RP starts, but 200 ms. before the motor act. The volitional process is therefore initiated unconsciously. But the conscious funct...

Anatomical and physiological evidence shows that the primate visual brain consists of many distributed processing systems, acting in parallel. Psychophysical studies show that the activity in each of the parallel systems reaches its perceptual end-point at a different time, thus leading to a perceptual asynchrony in vision. This, together with clinical and human imaging evidence, suggests stron...

In this paper, I will try to show that the idea that there can be consciousness without some form of attention, and high-level top-down attention without consciousness, originates from a failure to notice the varieties of forms that top-down attention and consciousness can assume. I will present evidence that: there are various forms of attention and consciousness; not all forms of attention pr...

In several visual tasks, participants report that they feel confident about discrimination responses at a level of stimulation at which they would report not seeing the stimulus. How general and reliable is this effect? We compared subjective reports of discrimination confidence and subjective reports of visibility in an orientation discrimination task with varying stimulus contrast. Participan...

Eliminative functionalism is the view that mental attributes, of humans and other machines, consist ultimately in behavioural abilities or dispositions. Hence, ‘Strong AI’: if a machine consistently acts as if it were fully conscious, then conscious it is. From these assumptions, optimistic futurists have derived a variety of remarkable visions of our ‘post-human’ future; from widely-recognised...

Time plays a central role in consciousness, at different levels and in different aspects of information processing. Subliminal perception experiments demonstrate that stimuli presented too briefly to enter conscious awareness are nevertheless processed to some extent. Implicit learning, implicit memory, and conditioning studies suggest that the extent to which memory traces are available for ve...

In this article we argue that self-deception evolved to facilitate interpersonal deception by allowing people to avoid the cues to conscious deception that might reveal deceptive intent. Self-deception has two additional advantages: It eliminates the costly cognitive load that is typically associated with deceiving, and it can minimize retribution if the deception is discovered. Beyond its role...

Synesthesia is an unusual condition characterized by the over-binding of two or more features and the concomitant automatic and conscious experience of atypical, ancillary images or perceptions. Previous research suggests that synesthetes display enhanced modality-specific perceptual processing, but it remains unclear whether enhanced processing contributes to conscious awareness of color photi...

Matsumura, Kiyoshi, Isao Abe, Takuya Tsuchihashi, and Masatoshi Fujishima. Central effects of leptin on cardiovascular and neurohormonal responses in conscious rabbits. Am J Physiol Regulatory Integrative Comp Physiol 278: R1314–R1320, 2000.—We determined the cardiovascular and neurohormonal responses to intracerebroventricular injection of leptin in conscious rabbits. Intracerebroventricular i...