| Koch, Quest for Consciousness | |||||
| Book | Page | Topic | |||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 9 | Brain activity is both necessary and sufficient for biological sentience. | |||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 9 | Dreaming is a highly conscious state. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 10 | Consciousness is an emergent property of certain biological systems. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 10 | Consciousness emerges from neuronal features of the brain. A system has emergent properties if these are not possessed by its parts. There are no mystical or new-age overtones to this. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 11 | Physical basis of consciousness is an emergent property of specific interactions among neurons and their elements. Although consciousness is fully compatible with the laws of physics, it is not feasible to predict or understand consciousness from these. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 12 | Until the problem is better understood, a formal definition of consciousness is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 12 | Consciousness is not restricted to humans. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 12 | It is plausible that some species of animals -- mammals, in particular -- possess some, but not necessarily all, of the features of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 13 | It takes an expert to distinguish a cubic millimeter of monkey brain tissue from the corresponding chunk of human tissue. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 16 | Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCC) -- Minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms jointly sufficient for a specific conscious percept. | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 19 | It would be contrary to evolutionary continuity to believe that consciousness is unique to humans. | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 20 | I ignore niggling debates about the exact definition of consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 24 | The idea that neural assemblies underlie percepts goes back at least as far as Donald O. Hebb (1949). [Gestalts] | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 26 | Inferotemporal cortex (IT) - a high-level region of cortex concerned with visual objects. [Gestalts] | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 28 | Columnar organization of the cortex. [Mountcastle, cortical columns] | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 29 | Amygdala -- a set of subcortical nuclei of the medial temporal lobe. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 35 | Action potentials propagate along an axon at 1-10 mm/ms. | 6 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 35 | Spikes are all-or-none. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 35 | All-or-none pulses are more immune to noise and environmental degradations than are continuous voltage changes, which would also take longer to propagate. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 36 | Yet another mode of action involves groups of inhibitory cortical interneurons linked by low-resistance organelles referred to as electrical synapses or gap junctions. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 38 | The electrical potential recorded outside the skull is replete with oscillatory activity. The frequency of these oscillations ranges from 1 Hz to ~100 Hz. | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 39 | In a quietly resting individual, the dominant rhythm is in the alpha band between 8 and 12 Hz. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 39 | Purposeful mental effort causes activity in the beta (15-25 Hz) and the gamma (>30 Hz) bands. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 39 | During drowsiness and sleep, high-amplitude, low frequency oscillations appear in the delta band (1-4 Hz). | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 39 | Electrodes below the skull can observe theta band (4-8 Hz) oscillations within the hippocampus and its recipient structures. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 71 | Neocortex is a Layered, Sheet-like structure. | 32 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 81 | Columnar principle of Cortical Architecture. [Mountcastle, cortical columns] | 10 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 88 | NCC -- Enabling factors - needed for any form of consciousness. Specific factors - required for one particular conscious percept (e.g., seeing a brilliant starry night). | 7 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 89 | Glia cells in the brain play a supporting metabolic role. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 93 | Emotions and the modulation of consciousness. | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 94 | Anesthesia and consciousness | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 95 | The most common targets of anesthetics are neurotransmitter-gated ionic channels at synapses. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 95 | Majority of anesthetics boost the potency of inhibitory synapses, which are widely distributed throughout the nervous system. Difficult to isolate a specific brain area that is "knocked out" by anesthetics. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 95 | NMDA synapses are related to long-term modification of synaptic connections among neurons that underlie learning and memory. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 95 | Hypothesis: NMDA synapses propensity to strengthen links among simultaneously active neurons may play a pivotal role in assembling the coalitions of neurons necessary for consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 95 | Functioning NMDA synapses are one of many enabling NCCs needed for a coalition to emerge and to be consciously represented. [Gestalts] [Edelman's dynamic core] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 96 | Anesthetics bind to receptor and channel proteins throughout much of the brain, too blunt a tool to help in quest for NCC. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 97 | A general strategy for circumscribing the NCC -- (table) | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 97 | NCC -- minimal set of neural events jointly sufficient for a specific conscious experience. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 97 | The NCC at any moment corresponds to the activity of a coalition of neurons in the cortex and thalamus and closely allied structures. [thalamocortical system] [Edelman's dynamic core] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 98 | Can every type of neuron in the cerebral cortex and the associated thalamic nuclei form part of the NCC? | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 101 | Neural specificity and the NCC | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 101 | Gerald Edelman's global aspect of consciousness -- tight interaction of very big neuronal assemblies, reaching clear across the brain. Christof Koch believes these ideas may be on the right track. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 105 | Many V1 cells do not directly contribute to the content of visual consciousness. | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 117 | Architecture of the Cerebral Cortex | 12 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 118 | Brodmann's Areas of the Human Neocortex - (diagram) | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 120 | Forward and Feedback Connections | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 124 | Thalamus and Cortex, thalamocortical connections. | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 127 | Ventral and Dorsal Pathways | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 128 | Inferior Temporal Cortex - (diagram) | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 129 | Prefrontal Cortex | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 130 | Prefrontal cortex is widely and reciprocally wired to premotor, parietal, inferior temporal, and medial cortices, the hippocampus, and amygdala. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 130 | Basal ganglia -- large subcortical structures that include the striatum and the globus pallidus. These ancient regions mediate purposive movements, sequences of motor actions or thoughts, and motor learning. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 130 | In vertebrates with no or only poorly developed cortex [e.g. reptiles], the basal ganglia are the most important forebrain centers. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 130 | Neurons in the deep layers of the cortex send their axons directly to the striatum. Via intermediate stations that include the thalamus, the basal ganglia project back to the cortex. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 130 | Basal ganglia are drastically affected in disorders such as Parkinson's or Huntington's disease, associated with severe motor deficits, up to a total loss of movement. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 134 | Topographic Areas of Visual Cortex - V2, V3, V3A, V4 | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 137 | Color perception | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 139 | Motion processing area, MT | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 145 | Posterior Parietal Cortex, Action and Spatial Position | 6 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 148 | Inferior Temporal Cortex, Object Recognition | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 153 | Attention and Consciousness | 5 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 158 | Visual search studies pioneered at Bell laboratories focused on the question: does the time taken to find a target increase as the number of distracting objects increases. | 5 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 158 | For some combinations of target and distractors in visual search studies, the search is effortless; the target "pops out" of the display. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 158 | Visual search pop-out depends not only on the local stimulus configuration, but also on more global textual or figural effects emphasized by Gestalt psychologists. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 163 | Does consciousness require attention? | 5 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 167 | Binding Problem -- the outside world is represented by nervous activity in a hundred or more distinct regions. [Llinás, Brain operates as a reality emulator.] | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 168 | Binding via neural synchrony | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 173 | Attention | 5 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 187 | Memories and Consciousness | 14 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 189 | Long -term memory | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 190 | Larry Squire | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 193 | Procedural Learning -- Skills and Habits | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 194 | Neuronal structures that acquire and maintain skills and habits include sensory-motor cortex, the striatum and related basal ganglia structures, and the cerebellum. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 194 | Declarative Memories | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 194 | HM | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 196 | Short-term Memory | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 196 | Working memory, composed of a central executive and several slave modalities, such as the visual buffer or scratchpad for visual information and the phonological loop for language. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 197 | Central executive of working memory controls access to the phonological loop, visual buffer, temporary storage for other modalities, via a sort of attentional selection process. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 197 | Attention and working.memory are closely intertwined, making it difficult to cleanly separate them. The more working memory is taxed, the less effective attention is at disregarding distractors. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 197 | Human intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is intimately tied to the performance of working memory. Working memory is characterized by a small storage capacity, semantic representation, and short duration. Without active rehearsal, its content fades within a minute. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 199 | While only a subset of working memory is consciously represented at any one time, working memory appears to go hand-in-hand with consciousness. [Edelman's dynamic core] | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 199 | Presence of working memory capabilities in individuals who can't talk, such as newborn babies or animals, is one indicator of the presence of some sort of consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 199 | Prefrontal Cortex and Working Memory. [Fuster's perception-action cycle] [Edelman's dynamic core] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 201 | Iconic Memory | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 201 | Iconic memory, a high-capacity, rapidly-decaying visual form of storage, is quickly established and persists for at least a few hundred milliseconds. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | One of the functions of iconic memory is to provide sufficient time to allow the brain to process brief signals. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | Transient interruptions of visual stream, as when the eyes blink, won't interfere with processing. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | Koch believes that iconic memory is necessary for visual perception. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | The existence of iconic memory implies that a minimal processing period is need for conscious perception. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | Iconic memory is probably instantiated throughout the visual brain, starting as early as their retina and including the various cortical areas and their associated thalamic nuclei. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | Think of iconic memory as the neuronal afterglow left in the wake of the visual input signal, prolonged and amplified by reverberatory activity, both within the local patches and loops within the cortex and the various pulvinar nuclei. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 202 | In the retina, cells respond for another 60 ms after the stimulus has been removed, while the afterglow for neurons in IT and the neighboring regions last up to 300 ms. This is what you experience as fleeting memory. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 203 | Koch believes that iconic memory is essential for visual consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 204 | Working memory goes hand-in-hand with consciousness. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 204 | Any organism with working memory capabilities is likely to be conscious, making the presence of working memory a litmus test for consciousness in animals, babies, or patients that can't talk about their experiences. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 204 | Working memory may not be necessary for consciousness. If a person were stripped of his working memory, he likely would remain conscious. He could still feel the world, even though he might not be able to talk about it. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 204 | Iconic memory -- a fleeting form of visual information storage that will last for less than one second -- is probably necessary for visual perception. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 204 | Iconic memory's neuronal substrate is the afterglow left by the waves of spikes sweeping up the visual hierarchy, amplified by local and more global feedback loops. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 204 | The function of iconic memory may be to ensure that even brief images last sufficiently long to trigger the NCC. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 205 | Zombie agents, a term invented by philosophers. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 207 | Zombie behaviors are like reflexes; blinking, coughing, sneezing. Zombie behaviors are flexible and adaptive reflexes that involve higher centers. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 213 | A spinal reflex does not require the brain. | 6 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 214 | Zombie agents are found in all modalities. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 215 | Pheromones -- volatile compounds secreted; alter the physiology or behavior of another individual. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 222 | Epileptic seizures - normal brain activity is disrupted | 7 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 226 | Zombie agents mediate nontrivial motor programs, not mere reflexes. | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 226 | Basal ganglia participates with cortex for zombie agents. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 227 | Turing Test for Consciousness | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 231 | Speculations on the Functions of Consciousness. | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 232 | Generate a model of itself, giving rise to self-consciousness | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 232 | Functions of consciousness and of qualia. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 235 | Stereotyped sensory-motor behaviors that bypass consciousness. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 3 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 235 | Several hundred milliseconds for a sensory event to give rise to consciousness. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 235 | Zombie agents can be trained to take over activities that formerly required consciousness. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 237 | Hybrid strategy of combining zombie agents with more flexible conscious module. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 244 | Front of the cortex is concerned with contemplating, planning, and executing voluntary motor outputs. [Fuster's perception-action cycle] | 7 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 246 | Consciousness is a property of highly evolved biological tissue. | 2 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 247 | Acquisition of zombie behaviors requires consciousness. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 266 | Cinematographic vision -- sometimes manifest during visual migraine; illusion of motion has been lost, migraine temporarily inactivated the cortical motion area. | 19 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 270 | Necker cube - visual bistable percepts. | 4 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 270 | Illusions - Necker cube - perceptual dominance | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 275 | Exuberant cortical activity does not guarantee a conscious percept. | 5 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 289 | Split-brain patients -- Corpus Callosum cut to alleviate epileptic seizures - result: two separate minds - surgeon Roger Sperry. | 14 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 290 | Broca's area in the prefrontal cortex and Wernicke's area in the temperol lobe are responsible for linguistic processing. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 290 | Right hemisphere is better at tasks of spacial cognition, visual attention, and visual perception such as face recognition and imagery. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 290 | Fusiform face area in normal subjects is larger in the right than in the left fusiform gyrus. | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 299 | Much of creativity is not conscious. | 9 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 305 | Many- if not most, motor actions in response to external events are rapid, transient, stereotyped, and nonconscious. [Stereotyped motor programs] [FAPs] | 6 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 310 | Edelman -- consciousness is experienced as integrated and as highly differentiated. [Edelman's dynamic core] | 5 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 310 | Dynamic core is stabilized for hundreds of milliseconds by massive reentrant loops, defined by the functional requirement that all core members interact more strongly with each other than with the rest of the brain. [Edelman's dynamic core] | 0 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 311 | Edelman's dynamic core is not that different from Koch's and Crick's conception of the NCC as the dominant coalition of neurons stretching halfway across the cortex. | 1 | ||
| Koch; Quest for Consciousness | 311 | Most scholars emphasize how the collective Gestalt-like traits of the brain and its networks are critical to understanding consciousness. [Gestalts] | 0 | ||
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