Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems

By Christof Koch, Marcello Massimini, Melanie Boly, Giulio Tononi. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2016

1,343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

There have been a number of advances in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness — the minimum neural mechanisms sufficient for any one specific conscious percept. In this Review, we describe recent findings showing that the anatomical neural correlates of consciousness are primarily localized to a posterior cortical hot zone that includes sensory areas, rather than to a fronto-parietal network involved in task monitoring and reporting. We also discuss some candidate neurophysiological markers of consciousness that have proved illusory, and measures of differentiation and integration of neural activity that offer more promising quantitative indices of consciousness.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c4f16a1a3a94621c67ce97c3ca6c54e25578a095

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Neural Circuitry of Wakefulness and Sleep (2017, neutral): “Consciousness has been little studied in animals, but it is a critical topic in clinical research (Koch et al., 2016).”
The spectral exponent of the resting EEG indexes the presence of consciousness during unresponsiveness induced by propofol, xenon, and ketamine (2019, positive): “Furthermore, xenon induced changes in the PSD that became progressively smaller as the frequency band increased from delta to beta—as expected when the overall PSD background becomes steeper (Laitio et al., 2008).”
Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis (2020, background): “The past two decades have witnessed substantial progress in the ﬁeld, which has been driven by an array of conceptual and experimental advances (Dehaene and Changeux, 2011; Koch et al., 2016).”
Neural correlates of perceptual consciousness from within: A narrative review of human intracranial research (2025, unknown): “Since the late 1990s, both the contrastive and the supraliminal approaches have resulted in a multitude of NCC candidates, mostly identified through non-invasive neuroimaging methods (for reviews, see Boly et al., 2017 ; Dykstra et al., 2017 ; Koch et al., 2016 ; Rees et al., 2002 ).”
Simultaneous invasive and non-invasive recordings in humans: A novel Rosetta stone for deciphering brain activity (2024, unknown): “…a valid experimental platform, such as language (Gallardo et al., 2023), the capacity to instantiate, imitate, and encode complex manual abilities (Del Vecchio et al., 2020) including intransitive gestures (Subiaul, 2016), and the distinctive property of human self-awareness (Koch et al., 2016).”
Intracranial neural representation of phenomenal and access consciousness in the human brain (2024, background): “During the past three decades, the neural correlates of visual awareness, a core component of consciousness in primates, have been studied extensively (Koch, 1990; Rees et al., 2002; Koch et al., 2016).”
The involvement of the human prefrontal cortex in the emergence of visual awareness (2023, background): “…visual awareness, and its biomarkers on EEG are the relatively earlier visual awareness negativity (VAN) at approximately 200ms after stimulus onset ( Koch et al., 2016 ; Koch, 2018 ; Lamme, 2018 ; Dembski et al., 2021 ), whereas the PFC is not necessary for the emergence of conscious experience.”
Hierarchical consciousness: the Nested Observer Windows model (2024, background): “Neuroscience continues to struggle to define a neural correlate of consciousness that produces a single locus of experience (Koch et al. 2016).”