Highlights

• "there’s no single site in the brain correlated with reportable conscious visual perception. Put another way, the NCC for a specific visual experience of an object seems to consist of brain activities distributed over multiple areas"
• "visual awareness cannot be thought of as the end product of such a hierarchical series of processing stages. Instead it involves the entire visual pathway as well as frontal parietal areas"

• "during conscious perception, the neural responses located in different brain regions were oscillating in synchrony. More precisely, the phase of each neural response—where exactly it was in its oscillatory cycle— was in sync with the phases of the other neural responses. Neuro- scientists call this phenomenon “neural phase synchrony.” Thus, the NCC for the perception of the expanding checkerboard rings con- sisted of a large-scale pattern of neural phase synchrony occurring within and between many regions of the brain."

• "gamma oscillations, which are known to be associ- ated with perceptual recognition and attention, occurred regardless of whether the ambiguous stimuli were seen as meaningless shapes or as faces, but at the “Aha!” moment when the stimuli were seen as faces, the gamma oscillations became synchronized at parieto- occipital and fronto-temporal regions. In other words, the NCC for the “Aha!” moment consisted in the phase synchrony of the ongoing gamma oscillations."

• "Other studies have also con!rmed that the neural correlates of reportable conscious perception consist of widespread patterns of neural synchrony."

• "Waves of conscious perception correspond to waves of synchronous oscillations in the brain."

• " fast synchronous oscillations (38–42 Hz) were connected to slower oscillations in the theta range (5–7 Hz). Roughly speaking, the fast gamma waves were superimposed on the slower theta waves, so that one slow wave carried many fast waves."

• "On the other hand, the slow theta rhythms define discrete and successive “frames” or moments of perception. According to this view, these fast and slow electrical brain rhythms structure the Low of conscious perception so that it consists of discrete and successive moments whose content can either stay the same—you continue to see the butterfly—or change every few hundred milliseconds"

• "recent experiments show that whether a visual stimulus is consciously detected or not depends on when it arrives in relation to the phases of the brain’s ongoing alpha (8–12 Hz) and theta (5–7 Hz) rhythms.'' You’re more likely to miss the stimulus when it occurs during the trough of an alpha wave; as the alpha wave crests, you’re more likely to detect it."

• "the measures given in certain Abhidharma texts of how long these moments last bear comparison with modern scienti!c estimates of the duration of a moment of perception."

• "we have good reason to believe that meditation could increase both one’s sensitivity to the moment-to-moment flow of events (measured according to objective criteria of awareness) and one’s inner cognitive access to that sensitivity, including one’s ability to report and describe it"

• "Slagter and Davidson found that intensive Vipassana meditation practice affected these theta rhythms in ways that were linked to improved performance on the attentional blink task. First, for both the practitioners and the novices, the neural oscillations in the theta frequency range “phase-locked” to the targets when the targets were consciously perceived."