Dear Susan.

I appreciate your comments and suggestion about the question. This is a nice article about the neural correlates of ‘blindsight’ in patients with hemispherectomy. As we know that the whole brain work together even to execute the simplest task or behavior, which might involve thousands of neural network from different brain regions, so it makes us to think about differences in functionality of whole brain or and the brain after hemispherectomy which removed the big chunk of the brain. For example primary visual cortex involved in vision and connected to the other part of the brain where the information from this part of the cortex is processed and stored in our subconscious brain which might involve Primary visual cortex connections to the hippocampus of the brain (like if we see a person’s face we remember it and this information is mostly stored in the hippocampal neurons). There is a nice review article about the neural correlates of the unconscious brain by Gaals and Lamme, 2012 where they have discussed about the prefrontal cortex top-down control of the conscious and unconscious brain, and also described that the residual activity of the brain during sleep and/or anesthetic condition and conclude the recurrent interaction of different brain regions during these condition is also similar to the interaction between several brain areas in conscious state of brain. It has also been revealed that increase in alpha range frequency oscillations during meditation in several areas of the brain is closely related to the subconscious state of the brain. I think there are several articles and webpages about the links between the flow of information in subconscious brain and mental disorders. Running of negative or bad thoughts and emotions in our subconscious brain leads to psychological disorders like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia etc. It is a complicated questions but what I am trying to understand is how these different brain areas and neural networks involved in keeping the information in subconscious brain and released it whenever needed, and how we can get access to the this kind of or similar information stored in subconscious brain of animal models of psychological disorders, so that we can make some approach to understand the genetic, molecular, cellular and neurophysiological understanding of the subconscious brain.

Thanks again

In fact, the idea of the brain processing complex information unconsciously is hardly new: Freud and Jung posited a complex, unconscious, a sector of the mind that harbours thoughts and memories actively removed from conscious mind, whose activities influence our conscious thoughts and behaviour. With elegant continuity, then, modern techniques in neuroscience are beginning to reveal the brain's unconscious inner workings. Because, this aspect of mind is, by definition, not accessible to introspection, it has proved difficult to investigate it thoroughly.

How the mind recognises that something is amiss in experiments is puzzling. Maybe because the vast and tangled neural networks of the cerebral cortex that encode images have learned that certain objects go together but others do not.

Given the sheer infinite number of possible combination of objects and context, is this solution likely to be done by the brain? Or maybe the masking techniques suppress visibility of the image but do not fully eliminate conscious access to them? It may be argued that whatever our eyes see goes through the amygdala before any cognitive machinations take place, but it is proved that whatever we see, unconscious cognitive machinations taking place before the image even reaches the eye.

Global workspace theory is a cognitive architecture with an explicit role for consciousness. It emphasises a two-way flow between conscious and unconscious brain activities. The theory has been implemented in large-scale computational and neural net models and bearing a close resemblance to Neural Darwinist models and also to and dynamical theories of brain functioning. However, it is helpful to think metaphorically of a theatre of mind. In the conscious spotlight on stage – the global workspace – an actor speaks, and his words and gestures are distributed to many unconscious audience members, sitting in the darkened hall. As such, cognitive architecture as a distributed set of knowledge sources which could cooperatively solve problems that no single constituent could solve alone. Functional brain imaging now shows that conscious cognition is distinctively associated with wide spread of cortical activity, notably toward frontoparietal and medial temporal regions. Unconscious comparison conditions tend to activate only local regions, such as visual projection areas. Frontoparietal hypometabolism is also implicated in unconscious states, including deep sleep, coma, vegetative states, epileptic loss of consciousness, and general anaesthesia. In recent years, global workspace theory has been found increasingly useful by neuroscientists. It makes minimal assumptions:

• That, brain can be viewed as a collection of distributed specialised networks, most of which do not directly support conscious experiences.

• That, potentially conscious brain activities can compete for access to a neuronal global workspace capacity – a fleeting memory whose focal contents integrate multiple sources into a single, coherent brain representation, which is then widely distributed to many unconscious specialized networks. The transfer of information from conscious visual episodes to the (unconscious) hippocampal system is a clear example of such distribution of conscious information in the brain.

• Prefrontal cortex has been suggested as one possible neuronal global workspace but posterior sensory cortices also appears to integrate, briefly retain, and distribute coherent neuronal events that are reportable as conscious.

• That some unconscious networks, called contexts, are needed to shape conscious contents. Thus, contextual parietal maps of the visual field, which do not support conscious features, modulate visual feature cells that directly contribute to conscious aspects of seen objects.

• That, such contexts can jointly constrain conscious events.

• That intentions and emotions can be viewed as ‘goal contexts’, shaping consciously reportable actions without themselves becoming conscious at the time.

• That, hierarchies of goal contexts can act as executive networks to interpret and act upon conscious events without entering consciousness directly. Areas of prefrontal cortex appear to support such functions.

Hi Khan! Thanks for putting up some historical facts and bringing up the thoughts of some psychoanalysts into the discussion. Yes that's true that these theories of conscious and unconscious brain are around for several decades, and it has been revealed that the activity of our subconscious brain can significantly affect the mental health and sometimes if these activities (negative thoughts, bad thoughts, emotions, etc.) it can leads to psychological disorders. It is difficult to access the information from subconscious brain, but with the current progress of research in the field of neuroscience and technological advancements might give us an opportunity to look for the neurobiological understanding of the subconscious brain and how it affect our mental health.

Thanks again

There's a good article - "The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious" at http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/BerlinTreatment.pdf

Heya Wayne, Thanks for the interesting article about the neural basis of unconscious brain. What I am trying to understand is the basis of subconscious brain which is somehow different than unconscious state. Thanks again.

Thanks to all for for very meaningful comments and sending the related links to understand some neurobiological aspect of subconscious brain. Although we need very intense research to really get close to complete understanding behind subconsciousness, but this really help to improve our understanding about conscious and subconscious state of brain. 

https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/BerlinTreatment.pdf

Article Neurobiological Basis of Consciousness

Could anyone entertain the concept that our subconscious is our "primate" brain without the fancy add-on circuits that make us just a little different? Evolution adds to already functioning systems, it doesn't create a brand new model from scratch. That would explain why we learn the skills that will more or less dictate the choices we will make for our entire lives between conception and 5-7 years of age. The add-on circuits manage different information but are constrained by our subconscious programming.