Vijay Shankar Sharma
Textbook neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and clinical terms. Not a reinterpretation of Vijay's Law or the Consciousness Index. 148 terms. Textbook meanings only.
12 terms. Page 1 of 1.
philosophy-of-mind · intermediate
The availability of a mental state's content for use in reasoning, verbal report, and the rational control of action, as distinguished from the raw subjective feel of the state itself. A piece of information can in principle be accessible for reasoning and report without there being anything it is like to have it, which is why philosophers treat access consciousness as conceptually separate from phenomenal consciousness.
neuroscience · intro
Also called: nerve impulse, spike
A brief, all-or-nothing electrical impulse that travels along a neuron's axon, triggered when the neuron's membrane voltage crosses a threshold. It results from a rapid influx of sodium ions followed by an efflux of potassium ions, restoring the resting state within about a millisecond. Action potentials are the basic unit of long-distance signalling in the nervous system.
clinical-and-disorders · intermediate
A neurological condition in which a person loses the ability to recognise objects, faces, sounds, or other stimuli, despite intact basic sensory function, indicating a deficit in the higher-level interpretation of sensory information rather than in the senses themselves. Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, in which a person cannot recognise familiar faces despite normal vision, is a well-studied form.
sleep-and-altered-states · intro
Also called: ASC
Any mental state that differs noticeably from an individual's ordinary, alert waking consciousness in terms of perception, cognition, or sense of self, including states induced by sleep, meditation, hypnosis, or psychoactive substances. The term is used broadly across psychology and neuroscience to group together a wide range of qualitatively distinct departures from baseline waking experience.
neuroscience · intro
A small, almond-shaped structure in the temporal lobe central to processing emotion, particularly fear and threat detection, and to attaching emotional significance to memories. It receives rapid sensory input that can trigger a threat response before conscious awareness catches up, which is part of why frightening stimuli can produce a bodily reaction before a person consciously registers danger.
clinical-and-disorders · intermediate
A rare complication of general anesthesia in which a patient regains some degree of consciousness during a surgical procedure, sometimes retaining explicit or implicit memory of events despite intended unconsciousness. Study of this phenomenon, along with the reverse question of what exactly anesthesia suppresses in the brain, has become an important empirical route into understanding the neural basis of consciousness itself.
clinical-and-disorders · intermediate
A neurological condition in which a person is unaware of, or denies, a deficit caused by their own illness or injury, such as a paralysed patient insisting they can move a limb that is in fact motionless. It is most often associated with damage to the right parietal lobe following stroke, and is distinguished from ordinary psychological denial by its direct neurological basis.
clinical-and-disorders · intro
An acquired language disorder, usually resulting from brain damage such as stroke, that impairs a person's ability to produce or comprehend spoken or written language, while typically leaving general intelligence intact. Different patterns of aphasia are associated with damage to different language-related brain regions, historically mapped through the study of patients with localised brain injuries.
clinical-and-disorders · intermediate
A neurological condition in which a person loses the ability to perform purposeful, learned motor movements on command, despite having the physical capacity, muscle strength, and basic motor coordination needed to do so, indicating a disruption in the planning of movement rather than in movement execution itself.
self-and-social-cognition · intro
A general physiological and psychological state of alertness and readiness to respond to stimuli, ranging along a continuum from deep sleep to intense excitement. It is regulated largely by brainstem systems including the reticular activating system, and is treated as distinct from the specific content of consciousness, since a person can be highly aroused yet still have very limited conscious awareness, as in some seizure states.
cognitive-science · intro
The cognitive process of selectively concentrating on some information or stimuli while ignoring other, competing information. Attention is limited in capacity, which is why tasks requiring sustained focus become harder as distractions or competing demands increase. It can be directed voluntarily, as when deliberately focusing on a task, or captured involuntarily, as by a sudden loud noise.
consciousness-theories · intermediate
Also called: AST
A theory of consciousness proposed by neuroscientist Michael Graziano, which holds that the brain constructs a simplified internal model, or schema, of its own attention process, and that this model is what we experience as subjective awareness. On this view, the felt sense of consciousness is a useful but simplified internal representation the brain builds of its own attentional state, similar to how it builds a body schema of its own physical form.