ArticleFrontiers in psychology2013
The efference cascade, consciousness, and its self: naturalizing the first person pivot of action control.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- A randomized controlled trial of Deep Brain Reorienting: a neuroscientifically guided treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.European journal of psychotraumatology · 2023Trial
- Movements During Intended General Anesthesia and Psychologically Traumatic Accidental Awareness: Explanatory Role of the "Efference Copy Network".Anesthesia and analgesia · 2026Article
- Conscious experience and emotion: an attention-based account.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- The function(s) of consciousness revisited: insights from a modular/constitutive model using vision as a test case.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Phenomenal interface theory: a model for basal consciousness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Antifragile control systems in neuronal processing: a sensorimotor perspective.Biological cybernetics · 2025Review
- Scaling up from sentience: modularity, conscious broadcast, and a constitutive solution to the combination problem.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Identifying Consciousness in Other Creatures: Three Initial Steps.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Noradrenergic modulation of saccades in Parkinson's disease.Brain communications · 2024Article
- The self and conscious experience.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Rethinking Vision and Action.Annual review of psychology · 2023Review
- Piecing together the puzzle of emotional consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2023Review
- Consciousness and its hard problems: separating the ontological from the evolutionary.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Widespread ripples synchronize human cortical activity during sleep, waking, and memory recall.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- An evolutionary perspective on chordate brain organization and function: insights from amphioxus, and the problem of sentience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- The neuroecology of the water-to-land transition and the evolution of the vertebrate brain.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- TheFrontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- The "Primitive Brain Dysfunction" Theory of Autism: The Superior Colliculus Role.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2022Article
- Awareness and consciousness in humans and animals - neural and behavioral correlates in an evolutionary perspective.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2022Article
- Drive competition underlies effective allostatic orchestration.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2022Article
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1 author.
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Abstract
The 20 billion neurons of the neocortex have a mere hundred thousand motor neurons by which to express cortical contents in overt behavior. Implemented through a staggered cortical "efference cascade" originating in the descending axons of layer five pyramidal cells throughout the neocortical expanse, this steep convergence accomplishes final integration for action of cortical information through a system of interconnected subcortical way stations. Coherent and effective action control requires the inclusion of a continually updated joint "global best estimate" of current sensory, motivational, and motor circumstances in this process. I have previously proposed that this running best estimate is extracted from cortical probabilistic preliminaries by a subcortical neural "reality model" implementing our conscious sensory phenomenology. As such it must exhibit first person perspectival organization, suggested to derive from formating requirements of the brain's subsystem for gaze control, with the superior colliculus at its base. Gaze movements provide the leading edge of behavior by capturing targets of engagement prior to contact. The rotation-based geometry of directional gaze movements places their implicit origin inside the head, a location recoverable by cortical probabilistic source reconstruction from the rampant primary sensory variance generated by the incessant play of collicularly triggered gaze movements. At the interface between cortex and colliculus lies the dorsal pulvinar. Its unique long-range inhibitory circuitry may precipitate the brain's global best estimate of its momentary circumstances through multiple constraint satisfaction across its afferents from numerous cortical areas and colliculus. As phenomenal content of our sensory awareness, such a global best estimate would exhibit perspectival organization centered on a purely implicit first person origin, inherently incapable of appearing as a phenomenal content of the sensory space it serves.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.