Can Neuroscience reveal the true nature of consciousness? - 1 - Can neuroscience reveal the true nature of consciousness? Victor A.F. Lamme Cognitive Neuroscience Group, Room A626, Department of Psychology University of Amsterdam, Roeterstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands tel 31 20 5256675, fax 31 20 6391656, e-mail V.A.F.Lamme@UvA.nl Consciousness is considered one of the ‘final frontiers’ in modern science. The phenomenon seems to escape all attempts to scientific reduction, and some philosphers argue that we may never be able to reveal its true nature. During the last decades, the subject has been taken up by neuroscientists, trying to find the ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (the NCC). It seems, however, that this is not solving the riddle in any real sense. What would we learn about consciousness if we knew what neurons or brain structures are involved? I think the answer lies in taking a different approach than finding the NCC. Our starting point should be neuroscience itself, not consciousness (which is rather ill-defined anyhow). I have devised a hypothesis about how phenomena like visually guided behavior, visual attention, visual memory and conscious visual experience might emerge from different neural mechanisms. This hypothesis can be tested (and further refined) with experiments using awake behaving monkeys and human subjects, doing electrophysiological recordings and electrical and pharmacological manipulations, as well as brain imaging (fMRI / EEG) experiments. If supported by these experiments, this hypothesis will reveal that consciousness is not what we think it is now. It is different from attention, working memory, reportability, or ‘thinking’. In some cases, we may even be visually conscious without knowing it ourselves. Thus, this new approach in studying consciousness, inspired on neuroscience rather than psychology or philosophy, may reveal the true nature of consciousness. At least we will learn new things about consciousness, not accessible via our introspective intuition of it, or via experimental observations which take this intuition as a starting point. The anwer will be: Yes, neuroscience can reveal the true nature of consciousness! The problem: finding the neural correlate of consciousness isn’t going to solve anything Consciousness: pondered by philosophers for millenia, studied by psychologists for a century, and now all eyes are on the neuroscientists, with their brain imaging tools, intruiging patient studies, trained monkeys etc., to reveal the answer to that age-old question – what is consciousness, and how does it emerge from our brains? But will they come up with a final solution? Research aimed at finding the ‘Neural Correlate of Consciousness’ (the NCC) 1,2 is booming. Its goal is to find the difference between neural activity that produces consciousness and neural activity that does not. But where will that take us? Consciousness is a rather ill defined phenomenon, and in fact one of the motivations for finding the NCC is to give a better definition of consciousness. Instead of first trying to exactly define consciousness, and then figure out how this works in the brain, the idea is to have (neuro)-psychological and neuroscientific findings converge towards a deeper understanding of consciousness. To start with, consciousness is loosely defined, as ‘the awake state in which we have experiences about which we can report at free will or request’, and the neural correlate of such a state and those experiences is sought. Then, we can refine the initial