School of Medicine and Health Sciences Poster Presentations
Toward a physiological model of consciousness: A proposed website and study design to integrate connectome-based data repositories, EEG/sleep waveforms, and networkbased models of consciousness
Poster Number
287
Document Type
Poster
Status
Graduate Student - Masters
Abstract Category
Neuroscience
Keywords
Consciousness, Physiology, Bioinformatics, Connectome
Publication Date
Spring 2018
Abstract
Several major efforts are underway to construct neurological connectomes that will model typical (and atypical) brain anatomy (i.e., neural circuitry) at various stages of human development. How consciousness emerges from the working brain is still under considerable debate. Stanislas Dehaene et. al. devised a method to observe (using EEGs) the difference in brain activity when a stimulus is perceived versus when it is not1. As a result, they have identified at least four signatures of consciousness that aid in our ultimate goal to construct a physiological model of consciousness. As consciousness may have a different meaning to different people, it is important to state an operational definition for it. Here, we operationally define consciousness as “the brain state of being awake; a state of awareness ranging from alert to drowsy, but not including the various stages of sleep, minimal consciousness, coma, or brain death.” While there are many network-based models of consciousness (e.g., The information workspace model, the default mode network, the anticorrelated network, etc.), these functionally based models tend to ignore anatomical and other physiological constrictions (such as the inhibitory or excitatory nature of specific neurotransmitter cell types). With our operational definition in mind, there are two purposes to this poster: 1) Create a data exchange format in order to automatically extract or exchange connectome data; and 2) Design an EEG-based study to determine the location of the neural circuitry involved in conscious activity.
1 Reference pending
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Open Access
1
Toward a physiological model of consciousness: A proposed website and study design to integrate connectome-based data repositories, EEG/sleep waveforms, and networkbased models of consciousness
Several major efforts are underway to construct neurological connectomes that will model typical (and atypical) brain anatomy (i.e., neural circuitry) at various stages of human development. How consciousness emerges from the working brain is still under considerable debate. Stanislas Dehaene et. al. devised a method to observe (using EEGs) the difference in brain activity when a stimulus is perceived versus when it is not1. As a result, they have identified at least four signatures of consciousness that aid in our ultimate goal to construct a physiological model of consciousness. As consciousness may have a different meaning to different people, it is important to state an operational definition for it. Here, we operationally define consciousness as “the brain state of being awake; a state of awareness ranging from alert to drowsy, but not including the various stages of sleep, minimal consciousness, coma, or brain death.” While there are many network-based models of consciousness (e.g., The information workspace model, the default mode network, the anticorrelated network, etc.), these functionally based models tend to ignore anatomical and other physiological constrictions (such as the inhibitory or excitatory nature of specific neurotransmitter cell types). With our operational definition in mind, there are two purposes to this poster: 1) Create a data exchange format in order to automatically extract or exchange connectome data; and 2) Design an EEG-based study to determine the location of the neural circuitry involved in conscious activity.
1 Reference pending