Finding indexes of spontaneous brain-to-brain communications when looking for a cause of the similarity of qualia assumed across individuals.
| Autor: | Bouten S; Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Montréal, Québec, H4H 1R3, Canada., Pantecouteau H; École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, Lyon, 69007, France., Debruille JB; Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Montréal, Québec, H4H 1R3, Canada.; Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, H3A 2B4, Canada.; Department of Psychiatry, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, H3A 1A1, Canada. |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Zdroj: | F1000Research [F1000Res] 2014 Dec 29; Vol. 3, pp. 316. Date of Electronic Publication: 2014 Dec 29 (Print Publication: 2014). |
| DOI: | 10.12688/f1000research.5977.2 |
| Abstrakt: | Qualia, the individual instances of subjective conscious experience, are private events. However, in everyday life, we assume qualia of others and their perceptual worlds, to be similar to ours. One way this similarity is possible is if qualia of others somehow contribute to the production of qualia by our own brain and vice versa. To test this hypothesis, we focused on the mean voltages of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the time-window of the P600 component, whose amplitude correlates positively with conscious awareness. These ERPs were elicited by stimuli of the international affective picture system in 16 pairs of friends, siblings or couples going side by side through hyperscanning without having to interact. Each of the 32 members of these 16 pairs faced one half of the screen and could not see what the other member was presented with on the other half. One stimulus occurred on each half simultaneously. The sameness of these stimulus pairs was manipulated as well as the participants' belief in that sameness by telling subjects' pairs that they were going to be presented with the same stimuli in two blocks and with different ones in the two others. In the P600 time window, belief, and thus social cognition, was found to have an effect on ERPs only at left anterior electrode sites. In contrast, ERPs were more positive at all electrode subsets for stimulus pairs that were in consistent with the belief than for those that were consistent. In the N400 time window, at frontal electrode sites, ERPs were again more positive for inconsistent than for consistent stimuli. As participants had no way to see the stimulus their partner was presented with, and thus no way to detect inconsistence, we proposed that these data could support the existence of spontaneous brain-to-brain communications. Such communications might provide a research avenue when trying to explain the similarity of qualia across individuals, which is assumed in virtually all instants of every day life. Competing Interests: Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. |
| Databáze: | MEDLINE |
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