Neuropsychology/Consciousness: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

    Below is the abstract of a forthcoming target article by:
                    Jeffrey Gray
                        on:
               CONSCIOUSNESS AND NEUROPSYCOLOGY

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be current BBS Associates or nominated by a current
BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to
suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to
become a BBS Associate, please send email to:

harnad at clarity.princeton.edu  or harnad at pucc.bitnet        or write to:
BBS, 20 Nassau Street, #240, Princeton NJ 08542  [tel: 609-921-7771]

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection by
anonymous ftp (or gopher or world-wide-web) according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.
____________________________________________________________________

                THE CONTENTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS:
                A NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL CONJECTURE

                Jeffrey A. Gray
                Department of Psychology
                Institute of Psychiatry
                De Crespigny Park, Denmark Hill
                London SE5 8AF, England
                jgray at ux.psych.lon.ac.uk

    ABSTRACT: Drawing on previous models of anxiety, intermediate
    memory, the positive symptoms of schizophrenia and goal-directed
    behaviour, a neuropsychological hypothesis is proposed for the
    generation of the contents of consciousness. It is suggested that
    these correspond to the outputs of a comparator that, on a
    moment-by-moment basis, compares the current state of the
    organism's perceptual world with a predicted state. An outline is
    given of the information-processing functions of the comparator
    system and of the neural systems which mediate them.  The
    hypothesis appears to be able to account for a number of key
    features of the contents of consciousness. However, it is argued
    that neither this nor any existing comparable hypothesis is yet
    able to explain why the brain should generate conscious experience
    of any kind at all.

    KEYWORDS: Conciousness, contents of consciousness, comparator,
    septohippocampal system, anxiety, schizophrenia.

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you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article.
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