X marks the spot - Mapping out the neural correlates of consciousness at the intersection between consciousness and attention

The question of how the brain generates consciousness has intrigued people for centuries but remains profoundly mysterious.

A well-known contributor to the problem is the fact that brain processes associated with attention are notoriously difficult to control for, because consciousness and attention interact.

Specifically, the degree of attention spent on a stimulus is highly predictive of whether the stimulus leads to a conscious experience or not.

Fascinatingly, attention also alters the very quality of the conscious experience, such that attended stimuli are experienced as having higher contrast, more vivid colors, etc.

Here, rather than trying to discount attention we will exploit the increased vividness that comes with attending a stimulus to map out the neural correlates of consciousness: neurons that generate conscious experiences should alter their activity as a function of properties of the experience.In a set of experiments, we will manipulate consciousness and attention orthogonally in a 2x2 factorial design while brain activity is registered using fMRI.

Novel data on the neuroscience of phenomenology will provide a vital injection to both the empirical and theoretical landscape of consciousness.

In addition, we will provide new data on the neuroscience of selective attention, by comparing attention to conscious and unconscious stimuli. The results will have implications across several disciplines including psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience.