Consciousness is subjective experience. During both sleep and anesthesia, consciousness is common, evidenced by dreaming. A defining feature of dreaming is that, while conscious, we do not experience our environment; we are disconnected. Besides inducing behavioral unresponsiveness, a key goal of anesthesia is to prevent the experience of surgery (connected consciousness), by inducing either un...

Unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS, previously known as vegetative state) occurs after patients survive a severe brain injury. Patients suffering from UWS have lost awareness of themselves and of the external environment and do not retain any trace of their subjective experience. Current data demonstrate that neuronal functions subtending consciousness are not completely reset in UWS; howev...

Raphaël Liégeois1, Mohamed Bahri2, Mattia Zorzi1,3, Steven Laureys2 and Rodolphe Sepulchre1,3 1 Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Liège, Belgium 2 Coma Science Group, Cyclotron Research Centre, University of Liège, Belgium 3 Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Email : {R.Liegeois, M.Bahri, MZorzi, Steven.L...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES In the past, time, cost, information, training, and the evaluation of the plane of anesthesia limited the acceptance of total intravenous anesthesia (TIVA). The objective of this study was to determine the attitude of anesthesiologists and other anesthesiology residents regarding total intravenous anesthesia. METHODS A questionnaire was sent to 150 anesthesiologists ...

The impact of epilepsy on quality of life (QoL) is well-documented. The ability of epileptic seizures to alter the conscious states of patients is also well established. Although there is much research on the QoL of people with epilepsy, few researchers have looked specifically at the effect of sudden, unanticipated alterations of consciousness on QoL. This lack of systematic studies of conscio...

Tulving (1985) posited that the capacity to remember is one facet of a more general capacity-autonoetic (self-knowing) consciousness. Autonoetic consciousness was proposed to underlie the ability for "mental time travel" both into the past (remembering) and into the future to envision potential future episodes (episodic future thinking). The current study examines whether individual differences...

Violence against people due to their sexual orientation is a phenomenon that exists within a framework of sexual stigma and sexual prejudice that can result in enacted stigma. The present study primarily aimed to validate the Stigma Consciousness Questionnaire (SCQ) and the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS; for lesbian, gay, and bisexual [LGB] populations) in the Spanish context by using samples...

In a recent Opinion paper in TiCS, Ned Block [1] confronts the recent empirical and theoretical challenges to his distinction between two forms of consciousness (i.e. rich ‘phenomenal’ vs sparse ‘access’). Although we value his attitude of facing these issues, we still believe that the proposed ‘unaccessed phenomenal consciousness’, which is the cornerstone of this theoretical proposal, remains...

In posing the sense of 'Rightness' as a quality-of-processing measure, Mangan runs the risk of a homuncular argument, since some process needs to observe Rightness, as well as the sensory qualia. Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) is an information processing account of cognitive activity that is concordant with Mangan's arguments, but which avoids the need for any supervisory system or cen...

Episodic memory deficits are predominately the first cognitive impairment in Alzheimer disease (AD). Previous studies have demonstrated that these deficits are specifically linked to autonoetic consciousness impairment, whereas noetic consciousness remains preserved in AD. This study focused on the self-reference effect and examined emotional valence, as it has been shown that emotional content...