NEUROSCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS DISORDERS

Prerequisites & course information

Requisites: ( PSYCH 454 and ZOOLOGY/PSYCH 523 ) or graduate/professional standing Course Designation: Level - Advanced L&S Credit - L&S Liberal Arts and Science Grad 50% - Counts toward 50% graduate coursework requirement Repeatable for Credit: No Last Taught: Spring 2026 Learning Outcomes: 1. Understand approaches used to distinguish between consciousness and its pre-requisites or consequences, and the importance of arousal systems for enabling consciousness. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 2. Describe current knowledge about cortical structures involved in specific conscious contents. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 3. Understand the complementarity of animal vs. human models to study consciousness. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 4. Describe the spectrum of alterations of consciousness present during sleep, parasomnia, anesthesia, coma, seizures, stroke, meditative and psychedelic states, and their neural correlates. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 5. Understand possible interactions and dissociations between consciousness, attention and memory. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 6. Describe the variety of current theoretical approaches to consciousness and their relevance to infer the presence of consciousness in artificial intelligent systems. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 7. Discuss a selection of recent studies - identified shortly before class as providing significant advances and/or reflecting current directions in the consciousness research field – and learn to critically analyze the methodological strengths and limitations of these studies. Audience: Graduate 8. Understand how to design an experiment probing the neural correlates of consciousness while accounting for its pre-requisites and consequences. Audience: Graduate Learning Outcomes: 1. Understand approaches used to distinguish between consciousness and its pre-requisites or consequences, and the importance of arousal systems for enabling consciousness. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 2. Describe current knowledge about cortical structures involved in specific conscious contents. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 3. Understand the complementarity of animal vs. human models to study consciousness. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 4. Describe the spectrum of alterations of consciousness present during sleep, parasomnia, anesthesia, coma, seizures, stroke, meditative and psychedelic states, and their neural correlates. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 5. Understand possible interactions and dissociations between consciousness, attention and memory. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 6. Describe the variety of current theoretical approaches to consciousness and their relevance to infer the presence of consciousness in artificial intelligent systems. Audience: Both Grad & Undergrad 7. Discuss a selection of recent studies - identified shortly before class as providing significant advances and/or reflecting current directions in the consciousness research field – and learn to critically analyze the methodological strengths and limitations of these studies. Audience: Graduate 8. Understand how to design an experiment probing the neural correlates of consciousness while accounting for its pre-requisites and consequences. Audience: Graduate