The Behavioral and brain sciences
December 1, 2007
Ned Block
1,123 citations
A puzzle arises in trying to separate the brain basis of phenomenal consciousness—the raw subjective experience—from the machinery needed to report that experience. The standard method of identifying neural correlates in clear cases (where people are certain and authoritative) is circular: it already assumes whether report-related machinery is part of the conscious state. The paper argues for an abstract solution and points to empirical evidence that phenomenal consciousness can overflow cognitive accessibility—that is, we can have conscious experiences we cannot report. It proposes that the neural basis of consciousness can be identified by excluding the neural basis of accessibility, an assumption justified by the explanations it enables.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
December 1, 1998
L Pessoa, E Thompson, A Noë
435 citations
Visual filling-in, the way the brain completes missing perceptual information, is often misunderstood because the term is used inconsistently. This article organizes perceptual completion phenomena into a taxonomy, distinguishing boundary completion (like illusory contours) from featural completion (color, brightness, motion, texture, depth). Reviewing single-cell studies, the author argues that some forms of completion involve spatially propagating neural activity, contradicting the view that filling-in merely ignores an absence. Measurable effects of perceptual completion depend on neural signals representing a presence. The author rejects the idea of a single neural stage underlying perception (the bridge locus) and argues against representational and enactive conceptions of vision, concluding that perceptual content should be evaluated at the level of the whole person interacting with the world.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
May 30, 2019
Samuel P L Veissière, Axel Constant, Maxwell J D Ramstead et al.
362 citations
A unifying account of how humans acquire shared cultural habits, norms, and expectations is developed by integrating the variational free-energy principle from theoretical neuroscience with concepts of cultural evolution and implicit learning. Humans construct social niches that provide epistemic resources called cultural affordances. Through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices, agents learn by inferring what other people expect—a process termed "thinking through other minds" (TTOM). This makes information about others' expectations the primary statistical regularity humans use to predict and organize behavior. The model aims to resolve debates in cognitive science between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind and between dynamical and representational views of enactivism.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
October 1, 2004
Daniel M Wegner
247 citations
The feeling of conscious will—the sense that we are the authors of our own actions—may be an interpretation rather than a direct readout of mental or neural causation. Clinical disorders like alien hand syndrome and phenomena such as hypnosis, automatic writing, and spirit possession show that will and action can come apart. A theory of apparent mental causation proposes that conscious will arises when a thought appears just before an action, is consistent with it, and has no salient alternative cause. In this view, the experience of will is a feeling that we think we caused an action, not a veridical report of how the action was produced.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
April 21, 2025
Stephen M Fleming, Matthias Michel
26 citations
Conscious vision is surprisingly slow, with unconscious integration windows lasting up to 400 milliseconds, as shown by postdictive effects. Because it is slow, conscious vision cannot guide online actions; instead, it evolved to support offline cognition, such as planning and internal simulation. This shift likely accompanied the water-to-land transition, where larger terrestrial visual horizons made model-based planning advantageous over the fast, reflexive actions typical of aquatic environments. The capacity for internal simulation created pressure for reality monitoring—distinguishing internal from external signals and solving when to stop integrating evidence to fix a model of reality. This reality monitoring function is linked to the emergence of consciousness, in line with higher-order theories. The account generates novel predictions about conscious versus unconscious vision in aquatic and terrestrial animals.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 22, 2025
François Stockart, Maor Schreiber, Pietro Amerio et al.
20 citations
The scope of unconscious processing remains hotly debated, driven by diverse methods for manipulating and measuring perceptual awareness. Through dialogue among researchers with varied theoretical backgrounds, ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues are provided for designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting results. These guidelines aim to evoke discussion about norms in studying unconscious processes and help researchers make informed decisions. While some recommendations may not align with existing approaches and will likely evolve, they are intended to foster a more convergent understanding of the extent and limits of unconscious processing.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
January 1, 2015
Tom Froese
14 citations
Pessoa's The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) offers an integrative neuroscience approach that aligns with enactivism, a cognitive science framework. Both perspectives treat complexity as central to mind and tightly link perception, cognition, and emotion—enactivism does so through its core concept of sense-making. They also argue that mental processes extend spatially beyond specific brain regions and neuroanatomical connections. An enactive neuroscience is now developing.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
January 1, 2018
Shadab Tabatabaeian, Carolyn Dicey Jennings
7 citations
Shamanic altered states of consciousness, although induced by different methods such as drumming, fasting, or psychoactive plants, share underlying neurophysiological features and produce similar cognitive and behavioral effects. This common foundation allows for broader cross-cultural comparisons of shamanic practices, which are not addressed by Singh's cultural evolutionary theory that emphasizes differences between induction methods.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 1, 2025
Manvir Singh
1 citation
Human societies everywhere develop complex cultural traditions—such as shamanism, supernatural punishment beliefs, heroic tales, dance songs, justice systems, and corporate groups—that share striking similarities. These "super-attractors" form what is called the "cultural manifold," a set of equilibrium states that hypothetically cultureless humans would eventually produce in a novel habitat. While previous explanations have emphasized individual or group benefits, this work argues that the primary driver is "subjective selection": humans produce and retain cultural variants they judge instrumentally useful for satisfying universal goals like healing illness, explaining misfortune, calming infants, and inducing cooperation. This goal-driven shaping of culture explains the convergence of complex traditions worldwide.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
July 10, 2026
Giulio Ongaro
The author argues that Singh's subjective functionalism, while a valuable synthesis, fails to account for the holistic nature of human culture. Unlike structuralist approaches in anthropology, which treat cultural elements as interconnected within systems, Singh's view isolates them. Using shamanism as an example, the author contends that cultural features are defined by their relationships to other features, not as standalone packages.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
June 25, 2026
Matan Mazor
Theoretical predictions about phenomenal consciousness in other beings are often untestable, creating evidential underdetermination. Combined with the moral weight assigned to consciousness, this situation risks turning consciousness science into a marketplace of rationalizations, where theories serve to reaffirm existing social practices and conventions rather than being empirically constrained.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
April 1, 2004
Michael V Antony
The author critiques Block's claim that the term "consciousness" is ambiguous between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness, arguing that the nature of ambiguity itself is unclear and that the conflation of these two concepts can be explained without assuming ambiguity. By avoiding controversial semantic issues, Block's argument could be strengthened.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
February 1, 1999
G O'Brien, J Opie
Two distinct approaches exist for explaining phenomenal consciousness in cognitive science: vehicle theories, which focus on the nature of the brain's representational vehicles, and process theories, which focus on computational processes over those vehicles. Vehicle theories have been rare due to dissociation studies suggesting conscious experience and explicit representation are separable, and due to the dominance of the classical computational theory of mind. However, recent critiques undermine the dissociation evidence, and connectionism now offers computational resources for a robust vehicle theory. The authors propose that phenomenal experience consists of the explicit representation of information in neurally realized parallel distributed processing (PDP) networks, a hypothesis that reassesses common assumptions about consciousness.