Functional MRI and the study of human consciousness.
Journal of cognitive neuroscience August 15, 2002 Dan Lloyd 92 citations
Functional brain imaging and phenomenology can be combined to study human consciousness. Four preprocessed fMRI datasets from the National fMRI Data Center were reanalyzed: response competition, object representation, word reading, and spatial working memory. Phenomenology provided initial structures—phenomenal intentionality, superposition, and temporality—that guided empirical predictions. Multivariate analyses of 27 subjects revealed analogues of these structures, especially temporality. In a second approach, artificial neural networks were trained on 21 subjects to detect whether present experience contains past and future brain states; nets were successfully trained to extract aspects of relative past and future states compared to controls. The exploratory study concludes these neurophenomenological methods warrant further application.