This research extends and confirms recent brainwave findings that distinguished an individual’s sense-of-self along an Object-referral/Self-referral Continuum of self-awareness. Subjects were interviewed and were given tests measuring inner/outer orientation, moral reasoning, anxiety, and personality. Scores on the psychological tests were factor analyzed. The first unrotated PCA component of the test scores yielded a “Consciousness Factor,” analogous to the intelligence “g” factor, which accounted for over half of the variance among groups. Analysis of unstructured interviews of these subjects revealed fundamentally different (...) descriptions of self-awareness. Individuals who described themselves in terms of concrete cognitive and behavioral processes exhibited lower Consciousness Factor scores, lower frontal EEG coherence, lower alpha and higher gamma power during tasks, and less efficient cortical preparatory responses . In contrast, individuals who described themselves in terms of an abstract, independent sense-of-self underlying thought, feeling and action exhibited higher Consciousness Factor scores, higher frontal coherence, higher alpha and lower gamma power during tasks, and more efficient cortical responses. These data suggest that definable states of brain activity and subjective experiences exist, in addition to waking, sleeping and dreaming, that may be operationally defined by psychological and physiological measures along a continuum of Object-referral/Self-referral Continuum of self-awareness. (shrink)

There is presently an ongoing debate about the relation between attention and consciousness, fuelled by results from paradigms which probe the interaction between these two faculties, such as the attentional blink, object substitution masking and change blindness. Simulations of these paradigms were shown recently to be able to provide an explanation of them from a single overarching control model of attention. This model furthermore allows exploration of how consciousness might be created as a copy of the attention movement control signal, (...) and indicates the complex possibilities inherent in attention. The paper develops this theme and presents a set of questions and their possible answers arising from the need for the existence of a set of inner selves associated with different attention copy signals in different modalities to provide a unified phenomenological experience. The paper concludes with a set of comments on the Hilbert questions of the Special Issue. (shrink)