Experiences that become meaningful to the self involve synchronous activity in a paralimbic network of self-awareness and dopaminergic activity, including medial prefrontal and medial parietal/posterior cingulate cortices. Oral administration of 100 mg dopamine improved noetic (conscious) metacognition in minimal self-awareness. In a separate experiment with extended self-awareness, dopamine improved retrieval accuracy of memories of self-judgment (autonoetic metacognition). Magnetoencephalography showed increased power of oscillations preferentially in the medial prefrontal cortex, explaining dopamine's specific effect on explicit self-awareness and autonoetic metacognition.
Perceptual vividness—the intensity of conscious experience—varies across different experiences, but how the brain registers this variation is unclear. In other psychological domains like number or reward, magnitude is represented independently of sensory features. Reanalyzing existing magnetoencephalography and functional MRI data from two studies that quantified vividness via subjective awareness and visibility ratings, evidence emerged for content-invariant neural signatures of vividness distributed across visual, parietal, and frontal cortices. These findings suggest that neural correlates of subjective vividness may share properties with magnitude codes in other cognitive domains.