PII S0361-9230(99)00144-6 Probing consciousness with an electrode

Abstract

Voluntary behavior is unpredictable, unlike a reflex. Can we understand voluntary behavior in terms of neural processes, as we understand a reflex? The question was nothing but an intractable fantasy until Robert Wurtz and Michael Goldberg published a series of four papers in Journal of Neurophysiology in 1972 [3–6]. While studying single cell activities in the monkey superior colliculus in relation to visual and oculomotor functions, the authors discovered that cells ’ visual responses changed depending on the monkey’s subsequent behavior even though an identical stimulus was presented. Goldberg and Wurtz started off the second paper [4] by writing, “In all previous studies on visual receptive fields of single neurons...,the properties of the cells were studied without regard to the behavioral significance of the visual stimuli.... Theawake animal does not treat objects in the visual world uniformly: it responds to some and ignore