Consciousness

• seCtIon tWo: tHe BRAIn

Other models of the relation between consciousness and unconsciousness try

to avoid the problem of arbitrary oppositions by allowing for both a binary and

a graded relationship between the two. One of these is the level-of-processing

hypothesis (Windey, Gevers, and Cleeremans, 2013), which suggests that the

transition from unconscious to conscious perception is influenced by the level of

processing imposed by task requirements.

One last example to consider is the neural basis of something none of us wel-

comes: a particularly insistent, and embodied, experience – pain.

PAIN

Pain hurts. But what does that mean? The all-too-familiar experience of pain

raises, in stark form, fundamental questions about NCCs. On the one hand, pain

is subjective. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines it as ‘an

unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or poten-

tial damage, or described in terms of such damage’, and adds, ‘Pain is always

subjective.’

Perhaps you suspect that your friend who complains at the slightest hint of pain

is just a wimp, but how can you know? Just as we cannot know whether your red

qualia are just like mine, so we cannot know just how bad someone else’s pain

really feels. Although genuine facial expressions of pain are – like genuine smiles

and laughter – hard to fake, your friend still might either be being terribly brave

in the face of agonising pain, or be being pathetic in the face of minor discomfort.

On the other hand, pain correlates with neural events (Chapman and Nakamura,

1999). When someone is injured, numerous chemical changes take place, and

signals pass along specialised thin, unmyelinated, neurons called C-fibres to the

spinal cord, thence to the brain stem, thalamus, and various parts of the cortex

including somatosensory cortex (the precise location depending on where the

injury was) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Interestingly, the correlation

between the amount of pain experienced and the amount of activity in these

‘Pain is always

subjective’

(International Association for the
Study of Pain, 2011)

PMFC

PPC

PMC

DLPFC

AIC

Controlled

processing

Automatic

processing

FIGURE 4.7 • (Left) Controlled processing areas activated during activation of cognitive control network regions during visual face

and auditory search. Activated areas: ACC/pSMA, DLPFC, IFJ, AIC, dPMC, and PPC. (Right) Automatic processing

after extended search for auditory targets. Here the control network has dropped out and only the sensory areas

remain active, processing the stimulus via automatic processing (from Schneider, 2009).