The neuronal basis for consciousness

Abstract

Attempting to understand how the brain, as a whole, might be organized seems, for the ¢rst time, to be a serious topic of inquiry. One aspect of its neuronal organization that seems particularly central to global function is the rich thalamocortical interconnectivity, and most particularly the reciprocal nature of the thalamocortical neuronal loop function. Moreover, the interaction between the speci¢c and non-speci¢c thalamic loops suggests that rather than a gate into the brain, the thalamus represents a hub from which any site in the cortex can communicate with any other such site or sites. The goal of this paper is to explore the basic assumption that large-scale, temporal coincidence of speci¢c and non-speci¢c thalamic activity generates the functional states that characterize human cognition