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Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 30 / Issue 01 / February 2007, pp 63-81
Copyright 2007 Cambridge University Press
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X07000891 (About DOI), Published online: 01 May 2007
Table of Contents - 2007 - Volume 30, Issue 01

Main Article

Consciousness without a cerebral cortex: A challenge for neuroscience and medicine

Bjor n Merker a1
a1 Gamla Kyrkvagen 44, SE-14171 Segeltorp, Sweden gyr694c@tninet.se

Article author query

merker b [PubMed][Google Scholar]

Abstract

A broad range of evidence regarding the functional organization of the vertebrate brain spanning from comparative neurology to experimental psychology and
neurophysiology to clinical data is reviewed for its bearing on conceptions of the neural organization of consciousness. A novel principle relating target selection,
action selection, and motivation to one another, as a means to optimize integration for action in real time, is introduced. With its help, the principal macrosystems of the
vertebrate brain can be seen to form a centralized functional design in which an upper brain stem system organized for conscious function performs a penultimate step
in action control. This upper brain stem system retained a key role throughout the evolutionary process by which an expanding forebrain culminating in the cerebral
cortex of mammals came to serve as a medium for the elaboration of conscious contents. This highly conserved upper brainstem system, which extends from the roof
of the midbrain to the basal diencephalon, integrates the massively parallel and distributed information capacity of the cerebral hemispheres into the limited-capacity,
sequential mode of operation required for coherent behavior. It maintains special connective relations with cortical territories implicated in attentional and conscious
functions, but is not rendered nonfunctional in the absence of cortical input. This helps explain the purposive, goal-directed behavior exhibited by mammals after
experimental decortication, as well as the evidence that children born without a cortex are conscious. Taken together these circumstances suggest that brainstem
mechanisms are integral to the constitution of the conscious state, and that an adequate account of neural mechanisms of conscious function cannot be confined to the
thalamocortical complex alone.

(Published Online May 1 2007)

Key Words: action selection; anencephaly; central decision making; consciousness; control architectures; hydranencephaly; macrosystems; motivation; target selection; zona incerta.

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