About us

What is conscious access ?

Even when we are awake, part of the information processed by our brain escapes our consciousness: we are not aware of it, we are not able to acknowledge or report it. For example, while you are reading this, your brain might be monitoring sounds from the street or a bird song entering through the window, as well as the sensation of a light breeze on your arm, but you are not aware of all that (well, now you are because your attention has been directed to it). The term “conscious access” captures this notion: the possibility to acknowledge, report, manipulate an information. It corresponds to the basic functional properties associated with conscious experience.

How can it be studied scientifically ?

In our team we are interested in understanding the psychological properties and the neural underpinnings of this conscious access phenomenon. To this aim, we typically compare brain activity in response to the same stimulus according to whether participants report experiencing this stimulus as conscious or not (“seen” or “not seen” for example). Below is the result of one such study from Sergent, Baillet & Dehaene, Nature Neuroscience 2005: the top row shows the film of brain activations in response to a visual word when participant report that they did not see it, and the bottom row shows brain activations to the same visual word when participants report it as seen.

Our current goals: understanding the neural mechanisms of consciousness, probing consciousness in non-communicating patients

Currently we are interested in detailing the brain dynamics and mechanisms associated with conscious access, in order to find a brain signature of this phenomenon. We also aim at understanding the temporal structure of consciousness. Notably, we try to understand how a conscious stream is constructed from moment to moment conscious access episodes.

​This research, conducted on healthy adults, also helps us interrogating consciousness in non-communicating patients (unresponsive wakefulness syndrom or minimally conscious state) through our collaboration with medical teams, mostly in Paris (Lionel Naccache), Lyon (Jacques Luauté & Fabien Perrin) and Toulouse (Stein Silva).

Our research in relation to the wider endeavour of understanding consciousness

The term “consciousness” covers many concepts. This schematic view registers some of the main themes currently investigated in research, and provides a proposition for their inter-relations. In this general landscape, our current research focuses essentially on three of these aspects: Conscious Access (the moment to moment conscious access to external or internal information), the Conscious Stream (how a conscious stream builds up from these conscious access events) and Conscious State (probing conscious processing in different states: sleep, anaesthesia, non-communicating patients).

Read also