Tutorial 1: The Scope and Limits of Brain Imaging in Consciousness Research

Brain imaging has gained a lot of attention within the consciousness research community. The aim of this workshop is to give a non-technical (i.e. no equations) introduction to brain imaging, allowing non-experts to be able to read and understand experimental reports critically. First I explain the basic procedures and mechanisms of how a typical fMRI or PET study is done, and how the data are analyzed. I then focus on the methodological problems that are often found in published articles, such as statistical errors and anatomical mis-localization. The results in imaging often depend on how the data were analyzed, and therefore a cautious reading of the methodology is necessary. I then move on to discuss issues of interpretation using examples from the consciousness research literature. I particularly pick out cases where theoretical interpretations of brain imaging results were misguided, and explain why some forms of arguments are fallacious. For example, the fact that two tasks reveal similar activations in the same brain region does not necessarily mean that they are fundamentally related; there are only so many brain regions defined by conventional labels. I then describe some more advanced methods that bypass the problems discussed. These include repetitional priming, connectivity analyses, high-resolution imaging and multivariate approaches. Finally I also describe other relatively new techniques such as MEG and fMRI-guided TMS and discuss how they might contribute to consciousness research in the future.

Tutorial 2: Representing and misrepresenting the body

What neural subsystems are implicated in representing one’s body? Do we draw upon the same subsystem to represent the bodies of others? How sensitive are such representations to input from different sensory modalities? What underwrites or constitutes our sense of bodily ownership, the feeling we have that we experience a particular body “from the inside”? In this workshop we investigate the central questions surrounding the ways in which we represent and misrepresent our bodies in thought and action. We canvas recent work in both philosophy and psychology, paying particular attention to neuropsychological data concerning disruptions in body representations such as asomatognosia and autotopagnosia and the susceptibility of normal subjects to illusions of limb ownership. We end with considerations as to how philosophical theories of conscious experience of our bodies can both inform and be informed by empirical data.

Tutorial 3: Reading conscious and unconscious mental states from human brain activity

Recent advances in human neuroimaging have shown that it is possible to accurately “read” or “decode” a person's conscious experience from non-invasive measurements of their brain activity. Such decoding is based on the idea that each thought is associated with a unique spatial pattern of brain activity. By training a computer to recognize these unique patterns it is possible to reliably read many different thoughts from a person’s brain activity. This tutorial will give a broad overview of the emerging field of “brain reading”, as well as an in-depth discussion of its implications for research on consciousness. The first section will provide a historical overview of brain reading with a special focus on EEG. The second section will concisely present the main brain imaging techniques used for brain reading (EEG, single- and multi-cell recordings, fMRI). The third section will introduce the key concepts of information theory and pattern recognition in an easily accessible form. The fourth section will present an overview of the current “state of the art” in the field including many examples. The fifth section will show in-depth all steps involved in a typical brain-reading study. For this purpose a study will be presented step-by-step that tracks a dynamically changing “stream of consciousness” using fMRI. A sixth section will demonstrate how decoding-based research can provide important clues about conscious and unconscious information processing, and how it is a useful framework for studying neural “representation” in general. Finally, the current challenges and limitations of brain reading techniques will be discussed along with perspectives for future research.

Tutorial 4: Can inner experience be faithfully described?

Psychologist Russell Hurlburt is known for his innovative methods of exploring inner experience. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is known for his skepticism about such methods. Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel will team up (perhaps “square off” would be a better term) and interview two subjects selected from the ASSC membership about the details of their inner experience. That interview will follow Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method: the subjects will have taken DES random beepers into their natural environments and paid attention to whatever experiences were ongoing at the moments of a half-dozen random beeps. Hurlburt, Schwitzgebel, and the tutorial attendees will question the subjects about those beeps during what DES calls the “expositional interview.” During these interviews, we (all tutorial participants) will conduct “sidebar” discussions about: what are the characteristics of good and bad questions; how believable are the subjects’ reports; to what extent do we “lead the witness”; etc.

Tutorial 4 attendees: Would you like be a subject in this demonstration? If so, visit http://www.nevada.edu/~russ/assc-demo-participants.html