Importance and Interdisciplinarity of the Research Topic
One of the most exciting and potentially significant advances in our understanding of the human mind is the idea that a specific aspect of brain function, its unique dynamics, is responsible for the fundamental phenomenon of primary perceptual awareness. This idea has far-reaching implications for other phenomena of consciousness, including self-consciousness and meta-consciousness. The study of consciousness is inherently multidisciplinary, involving philosophy, computational neuroscience, physics, neuroanatomy and physiology, cognitive science and traditional psychology, as well as literature, culture, and art.
This Summer Institute will explore in depth the hypothesis that the primary perceptual awareness, arguably the substrate for all other forms of consciousness, arises from synchronous neural oscillations at particular frequencies in particular areas of the brain, especially from the dynamic interactions between the cerebral cortex and the thalamus, the latter of which is an important sub-cortical area mediating cortical activity. This hypothesis is a minority view at present—most of the field seeks a solution to the problem of consciousness among other properties of cortical neurons alone. Moreover, the case for the hypothesis is complex, requiring careful development of several lines of evidence and thought in the several fields mentioned above. The Wall Summer Institute on “Synchrony in Mind, Brain and Consciousness” will gather prominent scholars who espouse this view together with others who oppose it and those who contribute in a more general way to our understanding of neural synchrony, to rigorously summarize the evidence for and against, and possible mechanisms of, this view of how consciousness might arise in the brain.