The Conscious Phenotype. (360G-Wellcome-100227_Z_12_Z)

The repertoire of physiological (and on longer timescales, anatomical) states in which an organism can survive is limited and these states define its phenotype. My research vision is to define the conscious phenotype - the set of states correlated with self-reported conscious experience of the external environment and its underlying basis in human brain anatomy and function. This will require an ambitious individual differences approach to characterizing the variability in conscious experience across people; how this is determined by their particular brain structure and function; and its stability and plasticity over time. This vision is articulated within the general theoretical framework I established in my Senior Fellowship, which proposes that awareness of the visual world reflects co-activation and connectivity between areas of superior parietal and prefrontal cortex and an activated visual representation in the ventral visual pathway. I have three key goals. First, to study individual brain areas within such distributed brain systems using MEG and fMRI imaging to determine whether common motifs underlie the relationship between brain structure, neural activity and phenomenal experience. Such common motifs are expected if phenomenal consciousness has an adaptive function of allowing discrimination of perceptual and mental states. Second, to study how individual variation in connectivity between cortical areas determines phenomenal consciousness. Finally, I will de ploy the powerful tools of simultaneous TMS-fMRI and brain training using real-time fMRI with biofeedback that I have developed at my host centre in order to test the causal role of the structures and connectivity that I have discovered.