- Title
- Non-conscious brain processes revealed by magnetoencephalography (MEG)
- Creator
- Walla, Peter
- Relation
- Magnetoencephalography p. 235-252
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/28211
- Publisher
- Intech
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- Information processing in the human brain can happen fully conscious or in total absence of consciousness. Despite being far away from understanding consciousness in terms of being a subjective phenomenon based on neural activity we can at least imagine what it means to be consciously aware of a sensory perception or knowledge or ourselves. At the very moment we know that we know and what we know, the respective knowledge is consciously processed and can be verbally expressed, but what about information processing in the absence of consciousness? Can non-conscious information processing do the same just without consciousness? It is difficult to imagine what kind of information processing happens below the level of consciousness and what it actually means. What does non-conscious information look like? What does non-conscious information represent and what can it do? These are important questions to be answered in order to better understand consciousness itself. Among others a recent review reports about unconscious high-level processing in the human brain. In this review, the authors summarise scientific evidence to support the idea that decision making, an apparently conscious process, as well as other parts of highly sophisticated human behaviour can happen automatically without conscious control. This is exactly in line with the spirit of this book chapter that is written to support this notion with neuroimaging data collected via magnetoencephalography (MEG).
- Subject
- consciousness; unconscious; magnetoencephalography
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1050838
- Identifier
- uon:15208
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789533072555
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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