Signs of consciousness in the brain

Neuroscientist Dr. Doping speaks about backward masking techniques, mechanisms of conscious perception and gamma activity.

How researchers define consciousness? What is the backward masking method? What happens in the brain at the moment of conscious perception?

If a person is present for a short time to flash the screen, which will be written word, even 30 milliseconds (assuming sufficiently bright signal), it is able to realize it. But, if immediately after the outbreak of the place where it was written the word, give the set of letters (called the mask), a person is not able to consciously perceive the written word before this word.

You can easily improve your memory and cognetive function – just buy Cerebrolysin, Cogitum, Cortexin, Picamilon, Vitamin B12.

When there is a conscious perception of the phenomena of the external world, the cortical areas associated with perception, such as visual or auditory begin to work more actively. For a while it was thought that if the stimulus acts on the brain and is not realized, as happens in the case of masking, the bark is not involved in information processing and only subcortical structures work. They believed that the information does not reach the cortex. This is not true. It turns out that even the unconscious perception of stimuli lead to reactions of activation of the visual cortex in response to the presentation of the visual stimulus.

Gamma activity not only occurs in a certain frequency and a sign, almost always concomitant consciousness. As part of these oscillations are synchronized work of a large number of areas of the brain. Including those of the front, which involved at the time of the emergence of consciousness, and the back, such as the visual cortex, which were not very active before.