Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

Fish Lack The Brains And The Psychology For Pain, Stuart W.G. Derbyshire

Animal Sentience

Debate about the possibility of fish pain focuses largely on the fish’s lack of the cortex considered necessary for generating pain. That view is appealing because it avoids relatively abstract debate about the nature of pain experience and subjectivity. Unfortunately, however, that debate cannot be entirely avoided. Subcortical circuits in the fish might support an immediate, raw, “pain” experience. The necessity of the cortex only becomes obvious when considering pain as an explicitly felt subjective experience. Attributing pain to fish only seems absurd when pain is considered as a state of explicit knowing.

Going Beyond Just-So Stories, Brian Key

Animal Sentience

Colloquial arguments for fish feeling pain are deeply rooted in anthropometric tendencies that confuse escape responses to noxious stimuli with evidence for consciousness. More developed arguments often rely on just-so stories of fish displaying complex behaviours as proof of consciousness. In response to commentaries on the idea that fish do not feel pain, I raise the need to go beyond just-so stories and to rigorously analyse the neural circuitry responsible for specific behaviours using new and emerging technologies in neuroscience. By deciphering the causal relationship between neural information processing and conscious behaviour, it should be possible to assess cogently the …

Cortex Necessary For Pain — But Not In Sense That Matters, Adam J. Shriver

Animal Sentience

Certain cortical regions are necessary for pain in humans in the sense that, at particular times, they play a direct role in pain. However, it is not true that they are necessary in the more important sense that pain is never possible in humans without them. There are additional details from human lesion studies concerning functional plasticity that undermine Key’s (2016) interpretation. Moreover, no one has yet identified any specific behaviors that mammalian cortical pain regions make possible that are absent in fish.

Pain-Capable Neural Substrates May Be Widely Available In The Animal Kingdom, Edgar T. Walters

Animal Sentience

Neural and behavioral evidence from diverse species indicates that some forms of pain may be generated by coordinated activity in networks far smaller than the cortical pain matrix in mammals. Studies on responses to injury in squid suggest that simplification of the circuitry necessary for conscious pain might be achieved by restricting awareness to very limited information about a noxious event, possibly only to the fact that injury has occurred, ignoring information that is much less important for survival, such as the location of the injury. Some of the neural properties proposed to be critical for conscious pain in mammals …

Animal Sentience: The Other-Minds Problem, Stevan Harnad

Animal Sentience

The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us. This is the “other-minds problem.” Within our own species, thanks to language, this problem arises only for states in which people cannot speak (infancy, aphasia, sleep, anaesthesia, coma). Our species also has a uniquely powerful empathic or “mind-reading” capacity: We can (sometimes) perceive from the behavior of others when they are in states like our own. Our inferences have also been systematized and operationalized in biobehavioral science …

Animal Suffering Calls For More Than A Bigger Cage, Simon R. B. Leadbeater

Animal Sentience

Ng (2016) argues for incremental welfare biology partly because it would be impossible to demonstrate conclusively that animals are sentient. He argues that low cost changes in industrial practices and working collaboratively may be more effective in advancing animal welfare than more adversarial approaches. There is merit in some of Ng’s recommendations but a number of his arguments are, in my view, misdirected. The fact that nonhuman animals feel has already been adequately demonstrated. Cruelty to animals is intrinsic to some industries, so the only way to oppose it is to oppose the industry.

Untitled, Kristina M. Lewin

Sound Neuroscience: An Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal

Patricia Churchland is a remarkable woman, an inspirational figure for other women, as well as scientists and scholars alike. She works and writes as a philosopher, but does not shy away from pointing out some of the problems inherent in the discipline. While readers can anticipate that her assertions will generally side with the explanations of neuroscience, she poses intriguing questions that deal with our notions of the philosophical self.

Eeg Investigation Of Mirror-Neuron Activity Before And After Conscious Perception Of Emotion In Faces, Katie Singsank

Summer Research

While it is theorized that the human Mirror Neuron System (MNS) is used in action understanding and interpretation, how mu-wave suppression varies throughout the process of becoming conscious of a human facial expression and perceiving it has not been investigated. In the current study, EEG mu-wave suppression was used as an index of MNS activity. Data were collected while subjects viewed a 6 second clip in which static visual noise lifted over a period of 3 seconds revealing either a sad or angry face below which participants were asked to indicate the emotion with a keyboard button press. The image …

Reducing Subjectivity: Meditation And Implicit Bias, Diana M. Ciuca

CMC Senior Theses

Implicit association of racial stereotypes is brought about by social conditioning (Greenwald & Krieger, 2006). This conditioning can be explained by attractor networks (Sharp, 2011). Reducing implicit bias through meditation can show the effectiveness of reducing the rigidity of attractor networks, thereby reducing subjectivity. Mindfulness meditation has shown to reduce bias from the use of one single guided session conducted before performing an Implicit Association Test (Lueke & Gibson, 2015). Attachment to socially conditioned racial bias should become less prevalent through practicing meditation over time. An experimental model is proposed to test this claim along with a reconceptualization of consciousness …

Unconscious Neural Processing Differs With Method Used To Render Stimuli Invisible, Sergey V. Fogelson, Peter J. Kohler, Kevin J. Miller, Richard Granger, Peter U. Tse

Dartmouth Scholarship

Visual stimuli can be kept from awareness using various methods. The extent of processing that a given stimulus receives in the absence of awareness is typically used to make claims about the role of consciousness more generally. The neural processing elicited by a stimulus, however, may also depend on the method used to keep it from awareness, and not only on whether the stimulus reaches awareness. Here we report that the method used to render an image invisible has a dramatic effect on how category information about the unseen stimulus is encoded across the human brain. We collected fMRI data …

The Structure Of Consciousness, Lowell Keith Friesen

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the nature and structure of consciousness. Conscious experience is often said to be phenomenally unified, and subjects of consciousness are often self-conscious. I ask whether these features necessarily accompany conscious experience. Is it necessarily the case, for instance, that all of a conscious subject's experiences at a time are phenomenally unified? And is it necessarily the case that subjects of consciousness are self-conscious whenever they are conscious? I argue that the answer to the former is affirmative and the latter negative.

In the first chapter, I set the stage by distinguishing phenomenal unity from other …

Current Neuropsychological Understanding Of Consciousness As Influenced By Antecedent Arguments In The Philosophy Of Mind, Jeff Kerr

Sound Neuroscience: An Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal

This paper provides a detailed description of the antecedent influences of philosophy on modern neuropsychological conceptions of consciousness. A brief philosophical history of consciousness in the form of several famous arguments is illustrated, which underlie modern understanding of the phenomenon. As a result, modern neuroscientific theories of consciousness are seen as very much a melody of multi-disciplinary historical ideas, which play notable roles in directing neuroscience investigation.

Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

Humans have a fundamental need for social relationships. Rejection from social groups is especially detrimental, rendering the ability to detect threats to social relationships and respond in adaptive ways critical. Indeed, previous research has shown that experiencing social rejection alters the processing of subsequent social cues in a variety of socially affiliative and avoidant ways. Because social perception and cognition occurs spontaneously and automatically, detecting threats to social relationships may occur without conscious awareness or control. Here, we investigated the automaticity of social threat detection by examining how implicit primes affect neural responses to social stimuli. However, despite using a …

Free Will From The Neuroscience Point Of View, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha

Armando F Rocha

There is still a controversy if human volitions and actions are governed by causal laws or obeys free will. Neurosciences start to study the neural correlates of free will by investigating how brains make decisions. Here, some of questions about free will are discussed from the neurosciences point of view taking into consideration a neuroeconomic model of decision making. This model is used here with the purpose of providing very formal definitions of key concepts raised in any free will discussion such as goals, necessity, motivation, etc., and to provide a formal background for discussing decision making. One of the …

Quintessence Of Dust: Cognitive Neuroscience And An Actor's Process, Jason Christopher Davis

Dissertations, Masters Theses, Capstones, and Culminating Projects

This thesis examines theories provided by cognitive neuroscience and applies them to an actor’s process. In particular, this research addresses the subjectivity and intentionality of our consciousness and special as-if states of consciousness, supported by the work of John Searle and Antonio Damasio. The phenomenal feeling of character-model control is discussed and supported by the work of Thomas Metzinger. The paper also considers our relative understanding of mirror neurons and specifically their function in relation to intersubjectivity and their use for an actor’s creation and conveyance of character in rehearsal and performance. It examines Stanislavsky’s notion of emotional memory and …

Iconic Memory Requires Attention, Marjan Persuh, Boris Genzer, Robert D. Melara

Publications and Research

Two experiments investigated whether attention plays a role in iconic memory, employing either a change detection paradigm (Experiment 1) or a partial-report paradigm (Experiment 2). In each experiment, attention was taxed during initial display presentation, focusing the manipulation on consolidation of information into iconic memory, prior to transfer into working memory. Observers were able to maintain high levels of performance (accuracy of change detection or categorization) even when concurrently performing an easy visual search task (low load). However, when the concurrent search was made difficult (high load), observers' performance dropped to almost chance levels, while search accuracy held at single-task …

Access To Another Mind: Naturalistic Theories Require Naturalistic Data, Mark A. Krause, Gordon Burghardt

Gordon Burghardt

If there is to be a natural theory of consciousness that would satisfy both philosophers and scientists, it must be based on naturalistic data and minimal clutter accumulated from semantic arguments. Carruthers offers a 'natural' theory of consciousness that is rather myopic. To explore the evolutionary basis of consciousness, a natural theory should include comparative psychological and neurological data that encompass nonlinguistic measures. Such an approach could provide a clearer picture of the adaptive function, mechanisms, and origins of consciousness.