Last update:
07-Jul-2019

The study of consciousness and its properties is a fruitful discipline of contemporary neuroscience. Consciousness is considered as a product of brain function, in contrast with several philosophical views, which claim that scientific research cannot reveal its nature and especially the individual instances of subjective, conscious experience (qualia). There are specific brain states, however, such us binocular rivalry, during which we can reveal how an optical stimulus can be perceived as a conscious perception. Studies have shown that there are specific brain regions in the visual path that are responsible for the conscious recognition of different categories of stimuli, such as faces, objects, places, animals, etc. Further studies have shown that in these regions there are neurons or groups of neurons which code the representations of these stimuli. These groups are interconnected in wider networks which code more complex representations and concepts. The content (qualia) of the current experience results from the binding and simultaneous activation of all these rich representations, and it is obvious that this will be subjective, and different in each individual, since one person's representations are different from the others.

Key words: Binocular rivalry, Brain, Concept cells, Consciousness, Neural representations.