Conscious Experience Depends on Multiple Brain Systems

Abstract

Following brain damage, information processing and consciousness can break down. This phenomenon is termed dissociation between preserved implicit (nonconscious) knowledge and impaired explicit (conscious) knowledge. Examples of the implicit/explicit dissociation are provided based on neuropsychological deficits such as cortical blindness, prosopagnosia, neglect, and amnesia. Also, models of the dissociation are discussed. The explicit/implicit dissociations are domain specific, in the sense that they always occur in a single domain only. For that reason, it is argued that there is no unitary area in the brain on which the activity of conscious experience depends. It is proposed instead that the neural substrate of conscious experience is distributed, and that the contents of consciousness depend on activity in many independent cortical areas.