Neural correlate
From Freepedia
The concept of a neural correlate of a mental state is an important concept for materialists, those philosophers who believe that all mental states are equivalent to brain states. According to strict materialists, all properties credited to the mind, including consciousness, emotion, beliefs, and desires have direct neural correlates. This is also pragmatic view adopted by most of neuroscientists.
The concept of a neural correlate is a fundamental concept in neuroscience. In recent years, papers have been published on the neural correlates of awareness, emotions, and decision making. Francis Crick wrote a popular book The Astonishing Hypothesis whose thesis is that the neural correlate for consciousness lies in our nerve cells and their associated molecules. Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch have sought to avoid philosophical debates that are associated with the study of consciousness, by emphasizing the search for correlation and not causation. The subject was recently reviewed by neuroscientists Mikhail Lebedev and Steven Wise. There is much room for disagreement about the nature of this correlation (e.g., does it require synchronous spikes of neurons in different regions of the brain? is the co-activation of frontal or parietal areas necessary?). The philosopher David Chalmers maintains that a neural correlate of consciousness, unlike other correlates such as for memory, will fail to offer a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.
References
- Schall, J. "On Building a Bridge Between Brain and Behavior." Annual Reviews in Psychology. Vol 55. Feb 2004. Pp 23-50.
- ^ Crick, Francis (1994), The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. ISBN 0-684-19431-7
- Chalmers, David. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-511789-1
- Metzinger, T. (Ed.) (2000). The Neural Correlates of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Wikibook on consciousness
- Lebedev, M.A., Wise, S.P. (2002) Insights into seeing and grasping: distinguishing the neural correlates of perception and action. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 1: 108-129.
