Bases neurobiológicas de la conciencia: aspectos neuroanatómicos, cognitivos y evolutivos

Research about consciousness from a neurobiological perspective is one of the most controversial issues in the broad domain of neuroscience. Traditionally, consciousness has been defined as subjective and private experience that arises from multiple neuronal activities and it includes our thoughts, memories and imaging. Usually, it has been made a distinction between intransitive consciousness that refers to a vigilance state opposite to clinical coma and transitive consciousness conceived as a conscious access to different pieces of information. From an evolutionary perspective, consciousness may be conceived as the result of complex cognitive skills leading to claim that it is distributed in phylogeny even beyond social mammals. From the relationship between consciousness and cognition, two theories have been widely discussed: the Dynamic Core and the Global Workspace. The first relates conscious experience to recurrent thalamo-cortical circuits, while the second considers parieto-temporal and prefrontal large neural networks as the basis for conscious access. It has been suggested that human consciousness depends on a default network. Furthermore, human consciousness could represent a narrative stream of reflective thought that is critical for the control of actions and is encultured by social interaction.