The Science of Subjectivity : Neuroscience, Medicine & Engineering
Event details
| Date | 05.12.2011 |
| Hour | 16:00 |
| Speaker | Dr Olaf Blanke |
| Location |
SV 1717 A
|
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
How can a human brain develop self-consciousness? What are the brain mechanisms involved in this process? Recent theories argue that especially the investigation of bodily perception and body experience is of key importance in the development of data-driven neurobiological models of self-consciousness. Extending initial neurological and neuroimaging findings we have manipulated several key aspects of self-consciousness by merging techniques from the field of engineering (virtual reality and robotics) with those from the cognitive neurosciences (multisensory perception and neuroimaging) and modeling. Our research determined the brain mechanisms of three crucial aspects of human self-consciousness: self-identification, self-location (i.e. the feeling that “I” am an entity that is localized at a position in space), and first-person perspective (i.e. “I” perceive the world from here). I will present work on pathological states of self-location and the first-person perspective due to disturbed multisensory integration after focal brain damage. I then detail the experimental manipulation of self-location and first-person perspective in healthy subjects using different visuo-tactile and visuo-vestibular conflicts and describe neuroimaging data using neuroscience robotics. These data suggest that activity of a special set of neurons in temporo-parietal cortex, insula, and extrastriate cortex reflect human self-consciousness. I will finally describe more recent efforts to automatize visuo-tactile and visuo-vestibular stimulations using robotics technology and simulate human self-consciousness by applying principles from computational neuroscience; the relevance for medicine (diagnosis and treatment of neurological and psychiatric disease, neuroprosthetics) will also be indicated.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- M. Mary / H. Hirling