Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Neuroscience — brains and nervous systems — representation, coding and dynamics measured in biological tissue.
152 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-029 v2 | Long-Term Cognitive and Neuropsychiatric Consequences of Repetitive Concussion and Head-Impact Exposure | McAllister & McCrea (2017), DOI-10.4085/1062-6050-52.1.14. This review concludes that most athletes’ symptoms recover within about 1–2 weeks of a concussion. Evidence that repetitive concussion or sub-concussive head impacts cause long-term cognitive decline, neuropsychiatric change or neurodegeneration (including CTE) is mixed and preliminary, with signals of vulnerability in subgroups (e.g., verbal memory). Settling it needs large prospective longitudinal studies with baselines and controls. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-858) in full; worth reading as a 2017 statement of what was and was not known about repetitive concussion: recovery within 1–2 weeks for most athletes, and no prospective longitudinal study of long-term cognitive, psychiatric or neurodegenerative risk. Read it knowing that it is a narrative review by authors of several studies it reviews, that its figures are second-hand, and that it predates the prospective CARE consortium results it calls for. |
| LIT-031 v2 | Moving away from lexicalism in psycho- and neuro-linguistics | Krauska & Lau (2023), DOI-10.3389/flang.2023.1125127. The authors argue that lemma-based production models encode two lexicalist assumptions: a morphology/syntax split, and a stored meaning–syntax–form “triad”. On that basis the models mishandle Inuktitut polysynthesis, separable Vietnamese idiomatic collocations, Hiaki number suppletion and English verb–object idioms. Updating the representations (treelets) is not enough, because the algorithms — separate lexical retrieval and structure building, word-sized increments — also have to change. They sketch an 8-stage non-lexicalist model and derive qualitative aphasia predictions from it. There are no new data and no implementation. | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-029); This is a clear diagnosis of where lemma models build in lexicalism, but its positive model is a verbal sketch (the full model is “in prep.”) and its aphasia predictions are untested; an implemented model, or lesion or aphasia data that separate its predictions from lemma-model ones, would settle it. |
| LIT-034 v2 | The sound of an axon’s growth | Folz et al. (2018), ARXIV-1807.04799. The paper proposes that an axon can set its length from motor-generated oscillations without reading their frequency. Two Hill-type stages turn the period (which grows with length L) into a shape change and then into a change in the mean of a contractility signal R. Coupling growth-cone protrusion (v_g c_I) against R-driven contraction (v_s c_R) then gives a stable length: about 125 µm with sub-µm (< 1 %) oscillation for the Fig. 4a parameters. In part of parameter space the final length rises as kinesin influx J0 falls, or as dynein coupling J_O falls, qualitatively as in experiments. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-067); A short, self-contained theory letter worth reading for its frequency-to-amplitude transduction argument (Eqs. 1–4) and the delay-equation length controller. It is a proof of mechanism, not a model fitted to axons: it has one parameter set, it never states the motor velocity v that converts its lengths into micrometres, and it proposes no experimental discriminator from gradient mechanisms. |
| LIT-056 v3 | Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness | Butlin et al. (2023), ARXIV-2308.08708. The report assumes computational functionalism and takes a “theory-heavy” approach. From it the authors derive 14 indicator properties: RPT-1–2, GWT-1–4, HOT-1–4, AST-1, PP-1 and AE-1–2. The claim for them is only that more of them raises the probability of consciousness. They assess a handful of systems against subsets of the list and conclude that no current system “appears to be a strong candidate”. Transformer LLMs have “only a relatively weak case” for any GWT indicator, because a single forward pass has no recurrence or global broadcast. Perceiver arguably has GWT-1, GWT-2 and half of GWT-4 but lacks broadcast. Among the embodied agents, AdA is the likeliest to meet AE-2. Most indicators could be built with standard ML techniques. The abstract’s “no current AI systems are conscious” is stronger than anything the body shows. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-052); the reference statement of the indicator-property (“theory-heavy”) approach to AI consciousness, worth reading for §1–§2 (method and theory survey) and Tables 1–2. Its §3.2 system verdicts are architecture-dated and cover only GWT and agency/embodiment. The 2026 Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper by an overlapping 20-author group may now be the citable version; I have not read it, so this should not yet be marked Superseded. |
| LIT-069 v2 | Surface optimization governs the local design of physical networks | Meng et al. (2026), DOI-10.1038/s41586-025-09784-4. The degree counts in Fig. 1d show k = 4 nodes making up 4.6–17.7% of branch points across the six datasets. The pooled 16.6% is 96% human-neuron nodes. Bifurcation angles also fail to peak at 2π/3. From this the authors infer that local branching minimises sleeve surface area under a minimum circumference w, not wire length. For a regular tetrahedron their numerical minimiser merges two bifurcations into a trifurcation at χ = w/r ≈ 0.83, and a thin branch sprouts orthogonally below ρ = w′/w ≈ 0.6. Per-dataset empirical thresholds are ρ_th = 0.52–0.92. The “exact mapping” to string-theory worldsheets covers only the unconstrained minimal-area problem. The SI says the implemented method yields surfaces that are only locally area-minimising (§5). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-075); a promising and cleanly falsifiable hypothesis, but the evidence does not yet separate it from simpler accounts. Three things would settle it: recomputing the empirical P(λ) without the SI’s trifurcation-merging rule, running the actual surface minimiser (rather than a sigmoid fitted to one tetrahedron) on random terminal sets, and testing the branching-to-sprouting breakpoint against a no-breakpoint null. |
| LIT-080 v2 | Understanding brain states across spacetime informed by whole-brain modelling | Vohryzek et al. (2022), DOI-10.1098/rsta.2021.0247. This is a narrative review with no new data, model or quantitative synthesis. It argues that healthy waking brain dynamics sit in a metastable regime near criticality, which whole-brain models (connectome-coupled Hopf oscillators, weakly coupled, at the edge of instability) reproduce. On its “activity landscape” picture, depression deepens particular attractors and psychedelics flatten the landscape. The depression side rests on three cited fMRI studies, one of them in remitted patients, and the review itself says “further studies will be required”. | Active — read in full 2026-09-25 (NOTE-054); a short, readable map of the Deco/Kringelbach whole-brain-modelling programme and its psychedelic/depression framing, worth reading as an entry point. It is a perspective, not evidence: the landscape picture is a hypothesis resting on small primary studies that it neither sizes nor weighs. |
| LIT-099 v2 | Framing Effects in Object Perception | Ivy & Mroczko-Wąsowicz (2025), DOI-10.1007/s13164-024-00763-8. A conceptual proposal with no new data. “Perceptual frames” are learned adaptations of the perceptual system, installed diachronically, often top-down, and then operating bottom-up. They let perceivers given identical input individuate different perceptual objects (the Bach motif, the radiologist’s tumour, the Teufel et al. two-tone image). So cognition shapes the perceptual system even if it is left open whether any single percept is penetrated. Support is a survey of others’ findings (Ernst & Banks 2002 cue weighting, prism adaptation, Teufel et al. 2018, expert anticipation) read through the frame concept. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-150); worth reading as a clear, short statement of a “system-level versus episode-level” way through the cognitive-penetrability debate, provided the reader knows that its empirical sections interpret others’ results and do not test the frame concept against its rivals. |
| LIT-135 v3 | Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism | Seth (2024), DOI-10.1017/S0140525X25000032. Seth argues that conscious AI needs computational functionalism and substrate flexibility extending to silicon, and that both are doubtful (§3.9). Against them he gives a positive, explicitly non-vitalist case, running from interoceptive predictive processing through the free energy principle to autopoiesis, that consciousness is a property “of only (but not necessarily all) living systems” (§4). He concludes that real artificial consciousness is “unlikely along current trajectories” and would need “living AI” (§5.8), while conscious-seeming AI is “almost certain” and may be “cognitively impenetrable” (§6.2). He concedes that “my case is not watertight” (§5.8). | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-169); worth reading as the leading statement of biological naturalism about AI, with a useful five-scenario map (Table 1) of what conscious AI would require. Its positive case rests on the free energy principle, which the paper itself calls “much debated” (§4.2), and it claims plausibility rather than necessity. The commentaries and the Author’s Response (BBS 49, 2026) are the next thing to read, and the response was not reached here. |
| LIT-147 v3 | Mental causation via neuroprosthetics? A critical analysis | Pernu (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11229-018-1713-z. The interventionist/difference-making case for nonreductive mental causation from BCIs (List & Menzies 2009; Menzies 2015; Woodward 2008a,b, 2017) misplaces multiple realisation. What the ensemble recordings show is that one cortical-level variable N (the ensemble’s average firing) is realised by many single-neuron patterns N1, N2. Each intention M corresponds to one value of N. So the counterfactual contrast “∼M □→ ∼B true, ∼N □→ ∼B false” fails, and neuroprosthetics supports mental causation only by identifying M with N, not nonreductive physicalism. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-091); Worth reading as a short, precise diagnosis of a specific equivocation in the interventionist BCI argument (multiple realisation at the wrong level). Its scope is limited to difference-making with a proportionality constraint (fn 1), and its identity conclusion rests on a simplified picture of neural decoding that it asserts rather than argues. |
| LIT-148 v2 | Computational Functionalism for the Deep Learning Era | López-Rubio (2018), DOI-10.1007/s11023-018-9480-7. Deep networks’ success comes from extracting successively higher-level features across multiple layers. López-Rubio argues that this calls for a new version of computational functionalism, keyed to deep neural computation rather than to classic program-based functional organization. | Unavailable — seeded from the abstract on 2026-09-26; a close reading was attempted the same day and found the article paywalled, with no open copy (the Málaga repository has none, and PhilPapers refused the request). It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-149 v2 | The information-processing perspective on representation | Martínez (2025), DOI-10.33735/phimisci.2025.11321. A position paper, not an argument to a conclusion. It proposes that representations are signals adapted to transmit information for its own sake (Transmission), and that the evidence for this is efficiency in trading off rate, distortion and coder complexity (RDC Trade-Off). It supports the proposal by showing that cognitive scientists already attribute representational status on those grounds: compression, error protection, and explicitness understood as ease of decoding. It proves no theorem and reports no data of its own. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-165); worth reading as the clearest short statement of a rate–distortion–complexity (teleo)semantics of representation, provided it is read as the position paper it says it is (§1: “comparatively light” on objections); the defence is in Martínez 2019b/2024 and in work the paper says is to come. |
| LIT-153 v2 | Making sense of transformer success | Angius et al. (2025), DOI-10.3389/frai.2025.1509338. Current attempts to explain transformer language models’ competence fall into three kinds, and the paper maps each onto an explanatory form from philosophy of cognitive science: machine psychology is Cummins-style functional analysis, induction-head work is Machamer–Darden–Craver mechanistic explanation, and NLM–fMRI brain-score studies are a bidirectional “co-simulation”. Its only thesis is that these do not differ from how cognitive science explains humans. Functional analyses are to be reduced to mechanisms as “mechanism sketches”. The paper rests on existing literature and adds no new analysis or data. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-106); worth reading only as a philosopher’s map of interpretability methods sorted by explanation type, and for the “co-simulation” label; the argument is thin, the Transformer primer contains a technical error, and a reader wanting the underlying results should go to the cited primary work (Elhage et al. 2021, Olsson et al. 2022, Caucheteux et al.). |
| LIT-190 v2 | The coherent and fluent mind: how unified consciousness is constructed from cross-modal inputs via integrated processing experiences | Winkielman et al. (2015), DOI-10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00083. An opinion piece proposing an extra route to the unity of consciousness across the senses. Different modalities feed one global, content-nonspecific experience of processing quality (fluency, familiarity, coherence), and this integrated feeling then enters decisions about its source and relevance. The main support is the authors’ own finding (Ziembowicz et al. 2013; three experiments) that coherent but unrelated background patterns in one modality made targets in another modality be judged more “regular”, “familiar” and “possible”. The authors state that direct evidence is still needed that such effects run through changed experience and that its integration is causal (p. 2). | Proposed — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-146); a promising, explicitly unproven hypothesis. It would be settled by showing, inside the cross-modal coherence paradigm itself, that the effect depends on an experienced feeling: for example, that it disappears when participants are led to attribute their sense of coherence to the background (the discounting manipulation the authors cite from other paradigms), and that reports of felt coherence mediate the judgement shift. |
| LIT-250 v3 | Duality of Bures and Shape Distances with Implications for Comparing Neural Representations | Harvey et al. (2023), ARXIV-2311.11436. The Procrustes shape distance between two representations (optimal rotational alignment of units) equals the Bures distance between their centred linear kernel matrices, so the rotation-invariant geometry of a representation is exactly the geometry of its kernel, and through Uhlmann’s theorem the fidelity of two kernels is the maximum overlap over all representations consistent with them. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-753) in full; worth reading as the clean finite-dimensional statement that, for centred linear kernels, the Procrustes distance equals the Bures distance and normalized Bures similarity is the cosine of the Riemannian shape distance, so the kernel is a complete invariant of a representation up to translation and orthogonal maps, and as the proof that CKA and NBS are related only within a rank-dependent envelope. Read it knowing that it covers linear kernels only, assumes the orthogonal group rather than arguing for it, and treats the infinite limits by a law-of-large-numbers sketch and a citation; it does not reach an RKHS or GNS statement. |
| LIT-257 v2 | What Representational Similarity Measures Imply about Decodable Information | Harvey et al. (2024), ARXIV-2411.08197. For linear readouts regularised by w ↦ wᵀG(X)w, the optimal decoded signal is K_X z with K_X = X G(X)⁻¹ Xᵀ / M, and the expected alignment of two networks’ readouts is Tr(K_X K_z K_Y). With K_z = I that gives linear CKA and mean squared CCA as normalized averages, ENSD as the average, and the GULP distance as the average squared readout distance. The Procrustes distance of normalized representations and the average decoding distance bound each other with constants set by the participation ratio of K_X − K_Y. All at finite M. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-834) in full; worth reading as the decoding reading of representational similarity: an optimal regularized linear readout outputs K_X z, so linear CKA, mean squared CCA, ENSD and the GULP distance are task-averaged readout statistics, and Procrustes distance and decoding distance bound each other through a participation ratio. Read it knowing that every identification fixes the target covariance to the identity at finite M, and that its population appendix is an outline that does not reach that case. |
| LIT-269 v2 | Attention Approximates Sparse Distributed Memory | Bricken & Pehlevan (2021), ARXIV-2111.05498. Kanerva’s SDM read weights each stored pointer by the number of neurons in the intersection of two Hamming balls of radius d. The paper shows that this weight is roughly log-linear in Hamming distance for close patterns. As a result, with L²-normalised vectors and a regression-fitted β, softmax attention reproduces SDM’s retrieval behaviour on random and learnt-projection data (App. B.7). Two things are weaker than they look. The analytic derivation (App. B.2, Eqs. 16–21) gets the exponent wrong: by my recomputation its β is ≈2–2.5× too small. The biological case is Kanerva’s 1988 cerebellar mapping, restated rather than re-argued. It also needs r = 2⁶⁴ ≈ 1.8×10¹⁹ neurons in the Attention setting, which the paper itself calls “biologically implausible” (App. B.5). | Active — read in full 2026-09-27 (NOTE-242); worth reading as the clearest statement of the SDM–attention correspondence. Its exact circle-intersection formula and its eight-algorithm convergence comparison are the parts to take away. Treat its analytic exponential derivation, its GPT-2 “confirmation” and its cerebellar implementation of attention as argument, not demonstration. |
| LIT-368 v2 | A decision-making theory of visual detection | Tanner & Swets (1954), DOI-10.1037/h0058700. Tanner and Swets model visual detection as testing a statistical hypothesis. The observer compares one sample of neural activity with a cutoff, and signal+noise and noise are Gaussian with equal variance, separated by d′ (the mean difference in noise-SD units, defined as the square root of Peterson and Birdsall’s d). The cutoff moves along a curve of P_SN(A) against P_N(A) (the curve now called the ROC; for d′ = 1 it passes through (.16, .50), (.50, .84) and (.84, .98)). The optimal operating point is where the slope equals β = [(1−P(SN))/P(SN)]·[(V_N·CA+K_N·A)/(V_SN·A+K_SN·CA)]. The 4AFC prediction is P(C)=∫F(x)³g(x)dx. With three paid observers, d′ estimated from yes-no data predicted 4AFC accuracy. The “false alarms are guesses” (high-threshold) hypothesis is rejected: false-alarm rate correlated with chance-corrected thresholds (ρ = .30, .71, .67; combined p ≪ .001), and all 12 fitted yes-no scatter lines miss the point (1, 1). | Active — read in full 2026-09-30 (NOTE-316); worth reading as the founding psychophysics paper of signal detection theory: it is short, it is the first place d′ is named, and it is the first to put the observer on the ROC and to set the likelihood-ratio criterion β from priors and payoffs. For the ideal-observer mathematics it defers entirely to Peterson and Birdsall (1953), and its experiment is small (three observers) with some statistics asserted rather than shown. |
| LIT-373 v4 | The two dragons of cognition: recursive condensation for predictive processing | Li (2026), DOI-10.3389/fncom.2026.1778902. A “Hypothesis and Theory” essay proposing that the neocortex is a “biological Savitch machine”. Alternating expansion (“odd parity”) and contraction (“even parity”) phases manufacture the disjoint closed sets of Urysohn’s Lemma, and storing (“memoizing”) the condensed tokens converts exponential search into polynomial “navigation”. Its one non-standard formal result, Theorem 2, R(N) ∝ b^{αN} (§5.2.2, p. 11), is stated without proof. There is no data, simulation or model. The two mathematical pillars are misdescribed: Savitch’s theorem saves space at the cost of time and does not memoize, and Urysohn’s Lemma gives a continuous separator, not a linear one, and is not an “if and only if”. | Rejected — re-read jointly with LIT-374 and arXiv 2602.07974 on 2026-10-01 (NOTE-321); Read jointly with LIT-374 and the companion StrLT preprint (arXiv 2602.07974), the essay is the cognitive motivation of a coherent programme: structure is discovered by costly search, condensed into frozen tokens, and reused cheaply. It is not just a misuse of two theorems. Read charitably, its mathematical slips are repairable and are not the reason to set it aside: the Urysohn “iff” and linear readout, Savitch as memoisation, the Definition 2 clash. The reason is what is left after repair: an amortised-inference and complementary-learning-systems picture already in the literature it cites; a neural mapping whose predictions do not discriminate it from standard consolidation accounts; one original quantitative claim, Theorem 2, that is not argued. A reader who wants the programme should read LIT-374 and the companion, where it is made precise. |
| LIT-383 | Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy | Bechara, H. Damasio, Tranel & A. R. Damasio (1997), DOI-10.1126/science.275.5304.1293. In the four-deck gambling task, 10 controls and 6 ventromedial prefrontal patients were tracked on choices, anticipatory skin-conductance responses and verbal reports. All controls and no patients developed anticipatory responses; controls came to prefer the good decks, significantly from the point they reported a hunch; three patients who could state the correct strategy kept choosing the bad decks. The authors conclude that nonconscious biases guide behaviour before conscious knowledge does. The statistics support the group difference more firmly than the “before knowing” timing. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-331); worth reading as the experiment the somatic marker hypothesis is usually cited for, and worth reading with its notes, which are weaker than its abstract. With 10 controls and 6 ventromedial patients, the robust results are that every control and no patient developed anticipatory skin-conductance responses, and that three patients who could state the right strategy still chose badly. The headline that controls chose well and responded to risky decks “before they knew” is only partly carried by the statistics: in the pre-hunch period the controls’ preference for the good decks was not significant (note 9), and the reported SCR effect there is a group-by-period interaction, not a bad-versus-good-deck difference (note 8). Controls chose the good decks significantly only once they reported a hunch. Whether the account is true is not this note’s question. |
| LIT-384 | The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex | Damasio (1996), DOI-10.1098/rstb.1996.0125. States the somatic marker hypothesis: ventromedial prefrontal cortex holds learned links between classes of situation and the body states (emotions) that went with them; when a situation recurs, those states are re-enacted, through the body or through an “as if” loop in somatosensory cortex, and mark imagined option-outcome pairs as good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, so that reasoning works over a pruned space. Evidence summarised: ventromedial patients with intact intellect decide badly in life, lack skin-conductance responses to emotive pictures, and in the gambling task keep choosing the losing decks and show no anticipatory responses. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-332); worth reading as the shortest statement of the somatic marker hypothesis by its author, with the evidence it then rested on. It is a hypothesis paper: the mechanism (ventromedial prefrontal linkages that re-enact body states, by a “body loop” or an “as if body loop”, which then mark options good or bad) is stated, not shown, and the evidence it reports is lesion and skin-conductance work summarised from other papers, without numbers. Its strongest piece, that ventromedial patients lack anticipatory skin-conductance responses in the gambling task while responding normally to the losses themselves, is reported here in one paragraph; the 1997 Science report filed alongside it is the place to see that result. Whether the account is true is not this note’s question. |
| LIT-385 v2 | Time-locked multiregional retroactivation: A systems-level proposal for the neural substrates of recall and recognition | Damasio (1989), Cognition 33:25–62. The convergence-zone proposal: memory is not held in one store but as feature fragments in early sensory and motor cortices, with amodal records of their co-occurrence held in local and non-local convergence zones downstream; recall is the time-locked reactivation of the fragments, directed from convergence zones through feedback projections. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request for Antonio Damasio’s work; no full text could be reached (the Elsevier article is closed, and no repository, author or course copy was found), so it is registered from its PubMed abstract only, unread, and no NOTE is filed |
| LIT-387 v3 | Feelings Are the Source of Consciousness | Damasio & Damasio (2023), Neural Computation 35(3):277–286. A “view” piece. Consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as belonging to an organism, and a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings provides it. Those feelings were the first phenomena of consciousness in evolution. They arise from a two-way interaction between the interoceptive nervous system and the viscera and their chemistry, so they are hybrid, at once neural and bodily, which the authors offer as a solution to the mind-body problem. Unread: placed from the abstract. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request; the full text exists as a free (bronze) PDF on MIT Press, but the site refused every automated request with a bot challenge (HTTP 403), and no repository, PubMed Central or preprint copy exists, so it is placed from the abstract only and no NOTE is filed. It is not the “Damasio & Damasio 2023” that NOTE-120 reports as a critic of plant sentience: that is a different work, an Animal Sentience commentary. Free copy: doi:10.1162/neco_a_01521 (MIT Press’s free bronze PDF). |
| LIT-388 | The nature of feelings: evolutionary and neurobiological origins | Damasio & Carvalho (2013), Nature Reviews Neuroscience 14:143–152. Feelings are mental experiences of body states, and they report homeostatic value: a valenced read-out of interoceptive maps that lets an organism learn and anticipate what restores or threatens its physiology. The first integrated whole-body maps are in the upper brainstem (parabrachial nucleus, periaqueductal grey, deep superior colliculus); the insula refines feeling but is not needed for it, since a patient with both insulae destroyed still feels pain, pleasure, hunger and compassion. The authors propose, without evidence of their own, that feeling starts in unmyelinated interoceptive fibres open to ions and ligands along their length. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-330); worth reading as the shortest statement of Damasio’s account of feeling as the felt read-out of homeostatic body maps, with its two empirical planks: patients whose insulae are destroyed still feel, and the upper brainstem is where whole-body interoceptive maps first assemble. It is an Opinion piece with no new data. The systems-level case rests on lesion and stimulation evidence it cites; the cellular proposal (unmyelinated interoceptive fibres and ephaptic coupling as the root of sentience) is offered as a hypothesis and stays one. |
| LIT-431 | Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain | Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2):183–201, with open peer commentary. There is no place in the brain where “it all comes together” for consciousness. Discriminations are made once, locally, and revised in parallel “drafts”, none canonical. The brain represents temporal order by content, not by the timing of its own vehicles, as a dated letter does. Colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit and Libet’s timing results stop looking anomalous. Whether a revision was pre-experiential (Stalinesque) or post-experiential (Orwellian) has no answer at that scale. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-367), the target article only; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Multiple Drafts model and of the case against “Cartesian materialism”, worked out on four timing phenomena (colour phi, the cutaneous rabbit, Libet’s backward referral and his delayed intention). Its sound core is the distinction between the time a content is represented and the time it represents. Its strong claim, that the Orwellian/Stalinesque distinction “need have no answer” below a few hundred milliseconds, is an argument from indistinguishability, not a demonstration. The open peer commentary (pp. 201–247) was not read. |
| LIT-445 | From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0 | Oizumi, Albantakis & Tononi (2014), PLoS Computational Biology 10(5):e1003588. IIT 3.0 states five axioms of experience (existence, composition, information, integration, exclusion), turns each into a postulate about mechanisms in a state, and identifies an experience with the maximally irreducible conceptual structure of a “complex”. Exclusion makes a complex a local maximum of integrated conceptual information Φ over all overlapping sets of elements, so complexes cannot overlap and no subset or superset of a complex is conscious. Worked logic-gate examples show minor complexes beside a major one, an inactive network that is conscious, a minimally conscious photodiode, and a feed-forward “zombie” functionally equivalent to a conscious system. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-365), equations excepted; worth reading as the formal statement of the exclusion postulate that Schwitzgebel’s 2014 manuscript (LIT-159) attacks: “of all overlapping sets of elements, only one set can be conscious”, a complex being a local maximum of Φ against every overlapping set. It is IIT’s anti-nesting principle, stated as a postulate and motivated only by the phenomenological exclusion axiom; the paper’s Occam’s-razor argument is given for exclusion within a mechanism, not between systems. It also says plainly that function does not fix consciousness, which is IIT’s answer to whether agency built from parts brings experience with it. |
| LIT-450 | Self models | Metzinger (2007, rev. 2013), Scholarpedia 2(10):4174. There is no substantial self, only a phenomenal self-model (PSM): the conscious part of an organism’s self-model, an instrument of global control. A phenomenal self arises “if and only if a system operates under a transparent PSM”, one it cannot introspectively recognise as a model; a first-person perspective is a transparent model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Self-models can be unconscious and artificial, as in Bongard, Zykov and Lipson’s limping starfish robot; embodiment comes in three orders, the third conscious. Full-body illusions are offered as the experimental handle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-372); worth reading as Metzinger’s own short, open statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT) behind Being No One (LIT-467): there is no self, only a phenomenal self-model, and a system experiences itself as a self when that model is transparent, that is, when it cannot introspectively recognise it as a model. It is an encyclopedia article, not an argument: the central claim is stated as a definition with a prediction attached, its empirical examples are cited, and the online text is a revision later than the 2007 acceptance, with editing slips. |
| LIT-453 | Philosophical conceptions of the self: implications for cognitive science | Gallagher (2000), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4(1):14–21. Divides philosophical accounts of the self into the “minimal self”, accessible to present self-consciousness without temporal extension, and the “narrative self”, extended in time through memory and story. The minimal self splits into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which come apart in involuntary movement and, after Frith, in schizophrenic thought insertion when a forward comparator fails. Neonatal imitation suggests an embodied minimal self; Strawson’s and Tani’s are momentary. Against Dennett’s narrative centre, the self is “the sum total of its narratives”. Read in the author’s preprint. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-377), in the author’s preprint, not the typeset article; worth reading as the paper that set the minimal self against the narrative self for cognitive science, and for the split of the minimal self into a sense of ownership and a sense of agency, which it ties to Frith’s comparator model of schizophrenic thought insertion. It is a short review: the empirical support is cited, not shown, and its own proposal, the self as “the sum total of its narratives”, is offered in two paragraphs. |
| LIT-467 v3 | Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity | Metzinger (2003), MIT Press. Per its publisher, “no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves”, and the phenomenal self is “the content of a ‘transparent self-model’”. A representationalist and functional analysis of the conscious first-person perspective, with conceptual “tools”, constraints on consciousness and neurophenomenological case studies (agnosia, neglect, blindsight, hallucination), asking whether being someone can be analysed at subpersonal levels. Unread: registered from the description and the contents; the theory is read in LIT-450. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-02 from the publisher’s description and the chapter list on Crossref, not read: no lawful full text of the book could be reached. The MIT Press Direct edition is not open access and no author copy is posted. Its theory is read in Metzinger’s own short statement, “Self models” (LIT-450, read in full), and more fully in his “Précis: Being No One” (PSYCHE 11(5), 2005; LIT-568, read in full 2026-10-03), the read substitute for the book, which sets out six of its ten constraints and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex still reports it closed with no open location; it is not in the Internet Archive’s MIT Press open-access collection, which holds Metzinger’s 2024 book (LIT-1943); MIT Press Direct returned a Cloudflare challenge; no author copy found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. |
| LIT-540 | Impulsive action: emotional impulses and their control | Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), Frontiers in Psychology 5:518. Impulsive action is non-deliberate but purposive. Automatic appraisal of an event’s pertinence to the agent’s concerns elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to establish, modify or end a relation to the object, with “control precedence” (urgency, persistence, attentional capture). Modes of action readiness are what distinguish one emotion from another. Events usually draw several appraisals and so several states of readiness, and their interaction regulates action: much emotion regulation is itself emotional, not reason overriding passion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-433); filed in place of Frijda’s The Emotions (LIT-546), which could not be read, as the shortest lawfully readable statement of his action-readiness theory in his own words. Appraisal of an event’s pertinence to one’s concerns elicits a state of action readiness, a motive to change one’s relation to the object, which has “control precedence”. Modes of action readiness correspond to emotions (hostility to anger, avoidance to fear). Much emotion regulation is itself one state of action readiness checking another, so “there is no clear distinction between processes of emotion and processes of emotion regulation”. It is a theoretical paper with no data, written for impulsive action, so it states the theory’s core and not its full range. |
| LIT-542 | The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization | Barrett (2017), SCAN 12(1):1–23. The brain runs an internal model of the body in the world for allostasis. Its predictions are “concepts” issued from agranular limbic cortex and refined by prediction error. Interoceptive predictions are felt as affect (valence, arousal). An emotion is an instance of categorizing sensation with an emotion concept, built the same way as any perception. Since instances of an emotion are “created by multiple spatiotemporal patterns” (degeneracy), the categories have no neural essences, and the classical view, basic-emotion and causal appraisal theories included, is rejected. Emotions are “constructions of the world, not reactions to it.” | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-434); worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the theory of constructed emotion and of its link to predictive processing. The brain’s core task is allostasis, run through an internal model whose predictions are “concepts”. An instance of emotion is what happens when the brain categorizes predicted interoceptive and exteroceptive sensation with an emotion concept. On this account emotion categories have no neural “essences”, and causal appraisal theories are “highly doubtful”. The paper is a theoretical synthesis: its own data are a few figures, and the rest is cited evidence and explicitly labelled hypotheses. |
| LIT-563 | HDDM: Hierarchical Bayesian Estimation of the Drift-Diffusion Model in Python | Wiecki, Sofer & Frank (2013), Frontiers in Neuroinformatics 7:14. HDDM is an open-source Python package that estimates the drift diffusion model (and the linear ballistic accumulator) by hierarchical Bayesian MCMC: subject parameters drawn from group distributions with informative priors, full posteriors, outlier handling, and regression of parameters on trial-by-trial covariates. A tutorial reproduces a theta-power effect on decision threshold that reverses under subthalamic deep brain stimulation. In simulations hierarchical Bayes recovers parameters and detects effects better than χ²-quantile and maximum-likelihood fitting, most with few trials. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-466); worth reading as the methods paper for HDDM, the Python package that fits the drift diffusion model by hierarchical Bayesian estimation (PyMC, MCMC), with subject parameters drawn from group distributions and trial-by-trial regressions of parameters on covariates such as EEG power. Its simulations show hierarchical Bayes recovering parameters with less error than per-subject χ²-quantile, maximum-likelihood or non-hierarchical Bayesian fits, most of all with few trials, and detecting drift-rate differences and covariate effects more often. The comparisons are the authors’ own, on data simulated from the model being fitted, and its hypothesis tests on the group posterior differ from the t-tests used for the other methods. |
| LIT-565 | The Time Course of Perceptual Choice: The Leaky, Competing Accumulator Model | Usher & McClelland (2001), Psychological Review 108(3):550–592. Perceptual choice as gradual, stochastic accumulation in one unit per alternative, with leakage and lateral inhibition between units and a threshold at zero. For two choices the linearised difference is an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process with net leak K = k − β; K = 0 recovers the classical diffusion model, and K ≠ 0 bounds asymptotic accuracy. The model fits time–accuracy curves slightly better than diffusion with drift variance, fits Vickers’s latency–discriminability data, predicts individual primacy or recency biases confirmed in a new experiment, and yields Hick’s law under a constant-accuracy criterion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-449); worth reading as the source of the leaky, competing accumulator (LCA): one leaky accumulator per alternative, lateral inhibition between them, a threshold-linear floor at zero, and an absolute response criterion. In the linear two-choice case the difference between accumulators is an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process with net leak K = k − β, so the classical diffusion model is the special case K = 0 and accuracy given unlimited time is bounded whenever K ≠ 0. Its evidence for leakage over drift variance is a modest likelihood advantage on 3 participants (combined ratio about 62 to 1, 7 of 9 curves), and the authors concede that a diffusion model with drift variance, starting-point variance and decision boundaries is hard to tell apart from it. |
| LIT-568 | Précis: Being No One | Metzinger (2005), PSYCHE 11(5), the author’s précis of Being No One. Minimal consciousness is a global world-model in a window of presence that cannot be recognised as a model (globality, presentationality, transparency). A phenomenal self is a transparent self-model: “no such things as selves exist in the world”. Transparency comes in degrees, and the self-model’s opaque partition is what lets humans doubt their own self-representation. The unity of consciousness is a single global functional cluster. A first-person perspective is a phenomenal model of the intentionality relation, and iterating it yields introspective and social intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-460), as the read substitute for Being No One (LIT-467), which it summarises in Metzinger’s own words. Worth reading as the most complete short statement of the self-model theory of subjectivity (SMT): more of the machinery than “Self models” (LIT-450), in particular the six constraints, the degrees of transparency, and the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation (PMIR). Phenomenal selfhood is a transparent self-model, “a function realized by a lack of information”; “no such things as selves exist in the world”. The unity of a conscious world is a global functional cluster bound by “highest-order binding”. It states the theory and its predictions; the evidence is cited, not shown, and the neural sections say how little is known. |
| LIT-569 | The Physics of Optimal Decision Making: A Formal Analysis of Models of Performance in Two-Alternative Forced-Choice Tasks | Bogacz, Brown, Moehlis, Holmes & Cohen (2006), Psychological Review 113(4):700–765. The pure drift diffusion model implements the SPRT and Neyman–Pearson test, so it is the optimal two-choice decision process. The O-U, mutual inhibition (Usher–McClelland), feedforward inhibition and pooled inhibition (Wang) models reduce to it for balanced parameters; the race model does not. For reward rate, Bayes risk and two accuracy-weighted criteria there is a unique optimal threshold, giving parameter-free optimal performance curves. With biased priors the optimal starting point is proportional to the log prior odds. | Active — read 2026-10-03 (NOTE-461), main text and Appendix B in full, Appendix A (the derivations) by section only; worth reading as the paper that puts the two-choice decision models in one frame and ties them to the sequential probability ratio test. The pure drift diffusion model is the continuum limit of the SPRT, so it is the fastest for a given accuracy and the most accurate for a given time. Of six models, all but the race model reduce to it in some parameter range: the Usher–McClelland mutual inhibition model when leak equals inhibition and both are large, the feedforward inhibition model when its inhibitory and excitatory weights are equal. Each reward criterion has a unique optimal threshold, which gives testable optimal performance curves. The optimality results hold for the pure model with stationary evidence and two alternatives. |
| LIT-576 | The Diffusion Decision Model: Theory and Data for Two-Choice Decision Tasks | Ratcliff & McKoon (2008), Neural Computation 20(4):873–922. A review of the diffusion decision model for fast two-choice tasks, with three new motion-discrimination experiments. Noisy evidence accumulates from a starting point z to one of two boundaries (0, a) at drift v, plus non-decision time and across-trial variability in v, z and Ter. The model fits accuracy and full correct and error RT distributions, and maps difficulty to drift, speed–accuracy instructions to boundary separation and stimulus proportion mainly to starting point. Applications cover aging, aphasia and links to neural firing. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-445), from the author manuscript in PubMed Central; worth reading as the canonical statement of the diffusion decision model and of what it is for. Two-choice RT and accuracy are decomposed into drift rate (quality of evidence), boundary separation (caution), starting point (bias) and non-decision time, plus across-trial variability in drift, starting point and non-decision time. Three new motion-discrimination experiments show each manipulation landing on its own parameter: difficulty on drift, speed–accuracy instructions on boundaries, stimulus proportion mainly on starting point. Its closing claim, that diffusion models have come “as near to provid[ing] a solution to simple decision making as is possible in behavioral science”, is the authors’ assessment, not a result. |
| LIT-578 v2 | Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior | Kelso (1995), Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior, MIT Press, xvii + 334 pp. The book-length statement of coordination dynamics. Unread: registered from catalogue records. What the record knows of its content comes from the works that cite it: the coordination potential of the HKB model (reproduced in Kelso 2021, Box 1), absolute versus relative coordination (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007, citing p. 98), a chapter on how HKB arose (ch. 3) and one on brain rhythms (ch. 8), per Kelso 2021. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book has no DOI, is not listed as open access, and MIT Press’s page refused an automated request. Under the owner’s rule for books it is supplanted by a shorter work by the same author, Kelso’s 2021 retrospective on the HKB model (LIT-601), which was read. It is filed because it is the citation others reach for when they mean coordination dynamics, relative coordination or metastability; De Jaegher & Di Paolo (LIT-571) and Raja et al. (LIT-598) both cite it. |
| LIT-580 | Uncertainty-based competition between prefrontal and dorsolateral striatal systems for behavioral control | Daw, Niv & Dayan (2005), Nature Neuroscience 8(12):1704-1711. Habitual and goal-directed control are model-free (“caching”) and model-based (“tree-search”) reinforcement learners in dorsolateral striatum and prefrontal cortex. Behaviour follows whichever controller’s value estimate is less uncertain under approximate Bayesian versions of each. Simulations reproduce the devaluation data: over-training yields devaluation-insensitive habit, except for actions near reward or in tasks with more actions and outcomes. Both controllers serve the same ends; neither is the “irrational” one. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-459), supplementary methods not read. Worth reading as the founding statement of model-based versus model-free control as two brain systems, and of arbitration between them by relative uncertainty. Goal-directed (devaluation-sensitive) behaviour is a prefrontal “tree-search” controller, statistically efficient but noisy to compute. Habit is a dorsolateral-striatal “caching” controller, cheap but data-hungry and blind to revaluation. Each controls behaviour when its value estimate is the more certain, which reproduces why over-training produces habits unless the task is complex or the action near the reward. Both controllers pursue “identical rational ends”: a rejection of the impulsive-limbic-versus-rational-prefrontal picture. |
| LIT-581 | Hierarchically organized behavior and its neural foundations: A reinforcement learning perspective | Botvinick, Niv & Barto (2009), Cognition 113(3):262-280. Hierarchical RL groups actions into reusable “options” with their own policies, subgoals and pseudo-reward. That eases the scaling problem by cutting the number of decisions to explore and learn. The paper builds an actor-critic version and maps option identifiers to DLPFC, option-specific policies to dorsolateral striatum, and option-specific values and option-length prediction errors to OFC. Unsuitable options produce negative transfer, so how useful options are discovered is the central open problem. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-451), from the PubMed Central author manuscript; the online appendix with the equations was not read. Worth reading as the bridge between hierarchical reinforcement learning (temporally abstract “options”) and the psychology and neuroscience of hierarchically organized behaviour. Options ease the scaling problem of RL by shrinking search and learning to a few decision points. An actor-critic version maps option identifiers to dorsolateral PFC, option-specific policies to dorsolateral striatum, and option-specific values and extended prediction errors to orbitofrontal cortex. The problem it puts first is option discovery: the wrong options cause negative transfer, as in human problem solving. |
| LIT-584 | Model-based and model-free Pavlovian reward learning: Revaluation, revision, and revelation | Dayan & Berridge (2014), Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience 14(2):473-492. Pavlovian prediction is not only model-free. A cue that had predicted disgusting salt became instantly “wanted” when a never-experienced salt appetite was induced, before the salt was retasted, which needs a prediction of the outcome’s identity revalued against the current bodily state. Over-training may “defocus” outcome representations rather than hand control to a model-free system. Dopamine may carry model-based evaluations. No algorithm for the revaluation is given. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-463), from the PubMed Central author manuscript. Worth reading as the argument that Pavlovian prediction, usually modelled as purely model-free, is also model-based. In the “Dead Sea salt” experiment a lever that had predicted a disgusting salt solution became, on first presentation after a novel sodium appetite was induced and before any salt was retasted, nearly as attractive as a sucrose lever, with mesolimbic activation. A cached value cannot do that. The CS must predict the outcome’s identity, and its value must be recomputed against the current bodily state. The paper adds “defocusing” of outcome representations as a model-based route to apparent habit, and argues that dopamine can carry model-based evaluations. |
| LIT-585 | The Expected Value of Control: An Integrative Theory of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Function | Shenhav, Botvinick & Cohen (2013), Neuron 79(2):217-240. Control is allocated by a cost-benefit decision. The expected value of control (EVC) of a candidate control signal is its probability-weighted payoff, with future value discounted, minus an intrinsic cost rising with its intensity. dACC monitors state and outcome information and specifies the identity and intensity of the EVC-maximizing signal. Lateral PFC and subcortical structures implement it. The account integrates conflict monitoring, effort costs and the override of defaults (exploration, foraging, patience). | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-446), from the PubMed Central author manuscript. Worth reading as the standard statement that cognitive control is allocated by a cost-benefit decision. The “expected value of control” (EVC) of a control signal, which has an identity (which task) and an intensity (how much), is its expected payoff minus an intrinsic cost that rises with intensity. Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex is proposed to monitor and to specify the EVC-maximizing signal, which lateral PFC and subcortical structures then implement. It is a review and synthesis: the model is stated, not fitted, and the authors say the ingredients are not new. |
| LIT-601 | The Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model: from matter to movement to mind | Kelso (2021), Biological Cybernetics 115(4):305–322, a 60th-anniversary retrospective. HKB models bimanual coordination by the relative phase φ, with dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ and potential V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ: both in-phase and anti-phase are stable for b/a > 1/4, and anti-phase loses stability below it, as observed when movement frequency rises. Noise, symmetry breaking (Δω) and metastability extend it; with Kuramoto’s model it becomes a generalized HKB for many agents. The same dynamics is reported within a body, between people and with machines, and in brain activity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-467), from the free-to-read publisher PDF. Filed in place of Kelso’s book Dynamic Patterns (LIT-578) and as the read account of the paywalled Haken–Kelso–Bunz paper (LIT-588), both Deferred. Worth reading as Kelso’s own short statement of coordination dynamics: the HKB order-parameter equation for relative phase, its stochastic and symmetry-breaking extensions, metastability as relative coordination, the generalized HKB–Kuramoto model, and the claim that one coordination dynamics holds within and between people. It is a retrospective by an author of the model, not a review, and it says so. |
| LIT-605 | An Accumulator Model for Spontaneous Neural Activity Prior to Self-Initiated Movement | Schurger, Sitt & Dehaene (2012), PNAS 109(42). In Libet’s spontaneous movement task, a leaky stochastic accumulator, δx = (I − kx)Δt + cξ√Δt, with weak constant urgency I and a threshold, fitted only to waiting times, reproduces the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96): time-locking to threshold crossings averages up the autocorrelated noise that produced them. Fast responses to random interruptions were preceded by a slow negativity, as predicted. The “neural decision to move now” is the late threshold crossing, about 150 ms before movement, so Libet’s inference of an unconscious decision a half-second earlier is unfounded. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-462); worth reading as the model that reinterprets the readiness potential. A leaky stochastic accumulator with a weak constant input (“urgency”), fitted with three parameters to 14 participants’ waiting times in Libet’s task, reproduces the shape of the averaged readiness potential (r² = 0.96) because averaging epochs time-locked to threshold crossings recovers the noise that happened to carry the accumulator there. Its prediction, that fast responses to unpredictable clicks are preceded by a slow negativity, was confirmed (13 participants). On this account the “neural decision to move now” is the threshold crossing about 150 ms before movement, not the onset of the readiness potential, and Libet’s inference that the brain decides before awareness is “unfounded”. The authors say plainly that this shows the readiness potential could reflect spontaneous fluctuation, not that it does. |
| LIT-614 | Bayesian model reduction | Friston, Parr & Zeidman (2018; v2 2019), arXiv:1805.07092. A review of Bayesian model reduction: given a fitted full model’s prior P, approximate posterior Q and free energy F, the free energy of a model with any other prior P̃ is ln E_Q[P̃/P] + F, and its posterior follows by reweighting Q (Eqs. 9–10). Closed forms are given for Gaussian, Dirichlet, beta, gamma, categorical and multinomial priors. Three worked simulations (sparse regression, cluster pruning in a Gaussian mixture, network discovery in a linear dynamical system) and a review of uses: structure learning, hierarchical (PEB) inversion as a cascade of reductions, and “sleep-like” pruning in active-inference agents. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-477); worth reading as the reference statement of Bayesian model reduction (BMR): the reduced free energy F[P̃:P] ≈ ln E_Q[P̃/P] + F[P] (Eq. 9), which the authors call a generalisation of the Savage–Dickey ratio “to any new prior”, with closed forms for Gaussian, Dirichlet, beta, gamma, categorical and multinomial priors (Eqs. 11–12, Table 1). The Dirichlet form is what lets active-inference agents prune their own likelihood mappings. Its examples are simulations, and its review of applications is of the authors’ own lab. |
| LIT-615 | An Active Inference Approach to Modeling Structure Learning: Concept Learning as an Example Case | Smith, Schwartenbeck, Parr & Friston (2020), Front. Comput. Neurosci. 14:41. A partially observed Markov decision process with eight animal “slots”, some starting with flat likelihoods, learns new concepts without feedback: a slot is engaged only when its flat mapping explains a feature combination better than any learned concept. Bayesian model reduction on the learned prior over states then resets slots the data did not need. In 100 runs per condition the true number of concepts won in 45–80% of runs for 4–7 concepts and rarely for 2–3, and in every run when the likelihood was given. The agent also generalises to an unseen animal in one shot, and the paper simulates neural and dopaminergic responses. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-485); worth reading as the record’s worked example of structure learning in an active-inference agent: “model expansion” by spare hidden-state slots whose flat likelihoods win inference only for a truly novel stimulus, and “model reduction” by applying Bayesian model reduction to the agent’s learned prior over states, so that unused slots are reset. It is a proof of concept with eight animals and six features. Reduction recovered the true number of concepts in 45–80% of 100 runs for 4–7 concepts, failed for 2–3, and succeeded every time only when the likelihood mapping was given rather than learned. |
| LIT-620 | Post hoc Bayesian model selection | Friston & Penny (2011), NeuroImage 56(4):2089–2099. If every model of interest is a full model with a different prior and the same likelihood, the evidence of any reduced model is p(y|m_F) times the full posterior expectation of p(θ|m_i)/p(θ|m_F) (Eq. 3). So the reduced models never have to be fitted. A point-mass reduced prior gives the Savage–Dickey ratio (Eq. 6). Under Gaussian priors and posteriors the reduced free energy and posterior are closed-form in the full model’s means and precisions (Eq. 9). In simulations an exhaustive search over 4,096 linear models finds the four true regressors, and 64 network models find the true three-connection graph. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-487); worth reading as the source of Bayesian model reduction: if a set of models differ from a full model only in their priors, the evidence of each is the full model’s evidence times the posterior expectation of the prior ratio (Eq. 3), so one inversion scores them all. Under Gaussian (Laplace) posteriors the reduced free energy is closed-form (Eq. 9). The Savage–Dickey ratio is the point-mass special case (Eq. 6), and ARD and model selection are the same evidence maximisation over prior hyperparameters. The demonstrations are simulations, and whether the reduced free energy of a nonlinear model is a good proxy for the free energy of the reduced model is left open by the authors. |
| LIT-626 | Three types of phenomenal consciousness and their functional roles: unfolding the ALARM theory of consciousness | Newen & Montemayor (2025), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380:20240314. The ALARM theory: phenomenal consciousness has two levels of experience and three functions. Basic arousal, realisable without cortex, alarms the body when a homeostatic variable leaves its tolerance range, overriding slow regulation with no choice involved; it adds lasting care for the injury and one-shot, generalised avoidance learning. General alertness, cortical and attention-guided, enables flexible learning and decision-making. Reflexive self-consciousness is general alertness with metacognitive self-relational content, not a third kind of experience, and enables long-term planning that accounts for one’s own and others’ mindsets. IIT, higher-order theories and GNWT are faulted for tying consciousness to neocortex and leaving basic arousal out. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-489); worth reading as the shortest statement of the ALARM theory: phenomenal consciousness has two levels of experience, basic arousal (subcortical, an alarm that overrides slow homeostatic regulation) and general alertness (cortical, attention-guided, for flexible learning and choice), plus reflexive self-consciousness, which is general alertness with metacognitive self-relational content and its own function, long-term planning. Its evidence is a short list of cited findings (hydranencephaly, decorticate cats, central lateral thalamus stimulation in macaques), and the functional claims are argued, not tested. |
| LIT-628 | Homeostatic feelings and the biology of consciousness | Damasio & Damasio (2022), Brain 145(7):2231–2235, an Essay. Consciousness occurs when mind contents are spontaneously identified as belonging to their organism, and a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings (hunger, pain, well-being, plain feelings of existence) supplies that identification and “lends” consciousness to exteroceptive images. Feelings are hybrid: interoceptive pathways are unmyelinated, partly non-synaptic and unprotected by a blood–brain barrier, so the body and its neural map interact directly. Posterior brainstem lesions abolish consciousness where large cortical ones may not; consciousness needs “a partnership of nervous systems with the bodies they serve”. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-03 (NOTE-507): every section was covered, but through a fetch tool that returned section-by-section accounts with short quotes, not a verbatim copy, so the quotes are unchecked; worth reading as the shortest complete statement of the Damasios’ claim that consciousness is the spontaneous identification of mind contents as one’s own, supplied by a continuous flow of homeostatic feelings, which are hybrid: in interoception the map and the body it maps interact and “commingle”. It is a five-page Essay with no data. Its evidence is clinical and cited (brainstem coma versus cortical lesions, general anaesthesia), and its mechanism is the cellular contrast in Table 1: unmyelinated, non-synaptic, barrier-free interoceptive pathways. |
| LIT-629 | Two neural correlates of consciousness | Block (2005), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(2):46–52. There are at least two neural correlates of consciousness: a phenomenal NCC, the minimal basis of an experience’s content (recurrent activation of MT/V5 with V1 for seen motion), and an access NCC, frontoparietal activation that broadcasts the content in a global workspace. Because access is a winner-take-all competition, a recurrent sensory representation can lose and stay unaccessed. Signal-detection analyses of exclusion tasks and of V1 figure–ground modulation in monkeys suggest experience without access. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-496); worth reading as the short empirical turn of Block’s distinction: a phenomenal NCC (recurrent activity in sensory areas, such as MT/V5 with V1 for seen motion) and an access NCC (frontoparietal broadcasting), with a winner-take-all contest for access as the reason the first can occur without the second. Its evidence is signal-detection reasoning: Supèr et al.’s V1 figure–ground modulation persists when low salience or many catch trials uncouple it from the monkey’s saccade. The case is suggestive, “a glimmer”, and the later papers make it at length. |
| LIT-631 | Conscious Processing and the Global Neuronal Workspace Hypothesis | Mashour, Roelfsema, Changeux & Dehaene (2020), Neuron 105(5):776–798. A review of the global neuronal workspace hypothesis by its proponents. Conscious access is a sudden, non-linear ignition of a distributed network of long-range pyramidal neurons, with prefrontal cortex a key hub, that amplifies, sustains and broadcasts one representation; unseen stimuli produce only a decaying wave. Evidence: a late (>200–300 ms) divergence between seen and unseen trials across modalities, prefrontal ignition in monkeys tied to the signal-detection threshold, and the disconnection of frontal-parietal networks by every major class of anaesthetic. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-510); worth reading as the record’s first source statement of the global neuronal workspace (GNW): conscious access is a non-linear “ignition” in which recurrent loops among long-range prefrontal, parietal and other hub neurons amplify, sustain and broadcast one representation to the brain’s specialised processors. Its strongest evidence is van Vugt et al.’s (2018) monkey recordings, where seen and unseen stimuli both drive V1 and V4 but only seen ones (and false alarms) ignite sustained prefrontal firing, and the signal-detection threshold maps onto the ignition threshold. It is a review by the theory’s proponents, explicitly a theory of access, and it concedes that the four leading theories cannot yet be told apart experimentally. |
| LIT-632 | Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness | Block (2009), in Gazzaniga (ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th ed., MIT Press, ch. 77, pp. 1111–1122. Compares the three theories neuroscientists take most seriously: higher-order thought, the global workspace and the biological theory. Only the biological theory fully acknowledges the explanatory gap; the others replace it with a puzzle their own theory creates. Concept dualism stops the gap becoming dualism. The ambitious higher-order theory also fails on stipulation, mismatch and infants. Integrated information is criticised as a theory of intelligence. The biological theory is the least friendly to machine consciousness. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-505); worth reading as Block’s comparison of the higher-order thought, global workspace and biological theories by one test: does the theory recognise the explanatory gap? The ambitious higher-order theory and the workspace theory turn the gap into a puzzle of their own making, so only the biological theory “fully acknowledges” it; concept dualism keeps that from becoming dualism. Also the source of the “biological theory” that Chalmers’s meta-problem paper cites as “Block 2009”, and a short argument that the biological theory is less friendly to machine consciousness than its rivals. |
| LIT-633 | Cross-region neuron co-firing mediated by ripple oscillations supports distributed working memory representations | Verzhbinsky, Daume, Cheng, Rutishauser & Halgren (2026), Nature Neuroscience 29:2566–2577. In 1,373 single units from hippocampus, amygdala, vmPFC, ACC and preSMA of 35 epilepsy patients doing a Sternberg task, ripples (70–100 Hz) co-occur between bundles up to about 220 mm apart with no decline beyond the local bundle, and cross-region unit co-firing rises about 30% during co-ripples. That rise exceeds a rate-only null (STTC 117% higher), grows with memory load, and co-ripples hold more repetitions of a stimulus’s encoding co-firing at retrieval, more on fast trials. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-494); worth reading as single-unit evidence that brief co-occurring ~90 Hz ripples in distant human forebrain sites (up to about 220 mm, across hemispheres) mark windows of raised cross-region co-firing, about 30% above no-ripple periods and beyond what firing rates alone predict, that this scales with working-memory load, and that stimulus-specific co-firing from encoding recurs more often inside co-ripples at retrieval, most of all on fast trials. One reanalysed open dataset (35 patients, one Sternberg task, load 1 versus 3), clinically placed electrodes, and correlational throughout: nothing perturbs the ripples. |
| LIT-636 v4 | The Border Between Seeing and Thinking | Block (2023), Oxford University Press, open access. Argues, by Block’s own précis (LIT-649), that perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional while cognition is paradigmatically discursive, conceptual and propositional, using scientific marks of perception such as adaptation; that core cognition splits between the two; and, in a chapter on consciousness, against cognitive theories of consciousness. Unread: seeded from the chapter list and the précis. | Unfetched — seeded 2026-10-03 from Crossref’s book and chapter records and from Block’s own précis (LIT-649), not read. The book is open access at Oxford University Press under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, so a lawful full text exists, and Block’s own copy is listed on PhilArchive as BLOTBB. Neither could be fetched. On 2026-10-03 academic.oup.com answered every request with a Cloudflare “Just a moment…” challenge, and OAPEN and DOAB, which normally mirror such books, refused this session’s requests. On 2026-10-30 the DOI resolved to academic.oup.com/book/45659, which answered HTTP 403 with a Cloudflare challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge), and philarchive.org/rec/BLOTBB did the same. Neither challenge was retried. The précis was read in its place. Filed because the record cites the book twice (NOTE-104 for pp. 454–458 on the neural replacement argument, NOTE-150 for the perception–cognition border), and those citations need a code. A human reader can open either copy, and a reading would move this to Active. Free copies: doi:10.1093/oso/9780197622223.001.0001 (OUP’s open-access book, academic.oup.com/book/45659); philarchive.org/rec/BLOTBB. |
| LIT-637 | What Is Wrong with the No-Report Paradigm and How to Fix It | Block (2019), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 23(12):1003–1013. Whether perceptual consciousness needs prefrontal circuits cannot be settled by no-report paradigms, because subjects not asked to report may still think about what they see, and that thought tracks the percept. A no-post-perceptual-cognition paradigm is needed. Brascamp et al.’s rivalry with inconspicuous switches is one, and it found no detectable prefrontal difference. Box 2 argues that binocular rivalry is driven by local features, against the predictive-processing account. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-495); worth reading as the argument that removing report does not isolate the neural basis of conscious perception, because subjects, monkeys included, can still think about what they see (“the bored monkey problem”). What is needed is a paradigm with no post-perceptual cognition that differs between percepts. Brascamp et al.’s inconspicuous binocular rivalry, whose switches subjects could not tell from constant random changes, is offered as one, and found no prefrontal difference by fMRI. Block flags that fMRI may be too coarse, and that ECoG could still favour prefrontalism. |
| LIT-638 | Interacting spiral wave patterns underlie complex brain dynamics and are related to cognitive processing | Xu, Long, Feng & Gong (2023), Nature Human Behaviour 7:1196–1215. In Human Connectome Project fMRI (100 subjects per cohort), the phase field of slow cortical fluctuations holds about 16–19 rotating spirals at a time, centred on phase singularities that drift superdiffusively and sit on boundaries between functional regions. Opposite spirals annihilate, like ones repel. Spiral locations and rotation directions decode four language-task conditions at about 48% (chance 25%, matched raw-signal decoder 30%), and spiral arrays route task activity flow bottom-up while listening and top-down while answering. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-502); worth reading as the claim that slow (0.01–0.1 Hz) human cortical fMRI fluctuations self-organise into many mobile, interacting spiral waves around phase singularities, as in excitable media and turbulence, and that their locations and rotation directions are task-specific and steer large-scale activity flow. The detection is careful about filtering artefacts (phase-randomised null, filtered–unfiltered similarity); the functional claims are correlational, the spatial scale was chosen to maximise task decoding, and the “gate” and “wall” rules are read off streamlines and a phase-oscillator lattice, not tested by perturbation. |
| LIT-640 | Perceptual consciousness overflows cognitive access | Block (2011), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 15(12):567–575. A defence of the overflow argument: perceptual consciousness has a higher capacity than cognitive access. Critics who call it an illusion must posit detailed unconscious iconic memory and conscious generic or fragmentary representations, for which there is no independent evidence. Fragile visual short-term memory, a cortical store of about 5–7 of 8 items over 1–4 s that attention and dlPFC TMS spare while they impair working memory, supports rich perception. Overflow means most items are not accessed, not that any is inaccessible. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-500); worth reading as Block’s reply to the anti-overflow critics of 2009–2011. Sparse views must posit an unconscious iconic memory detailed enough to do the Sperling and Amsterdam tasks plus conscious “generic” letters or rectangles, and Block argues there is no independent evidence for either. It adds fragile visual short-term memory (about 6–7 of 8 items at 1–2.5 s, cortical, in V4, spared by right dlPFC TMS that impairs working memory) and an imagery task as support. Read from the in-press version. |
| LIT-644 | Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics during sustained conscious visual perception | Vishne, Gerber, Knight & Deouell (2023), Cell Reports 42:112752. Ten patients with subdural electrodes watched images for 300–1,500 ms with no report on analysed trials. High-frequency activity dropped about 80% after onset in every region, but category and exemplar information in ventral temporal cortex stayed decodable and time-invariant for as long as the image stayed on. Prefrontal and parietal information was a transient burst at about 150–600 ms that did not track duration. Both IIT’s and the global workspace’s predictions for this paradigm held. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-499); worth reading as the cleanest test in the record of what neural activity does while a seen image simply stays on. In 10 epilepsy patients with subdural electrodes, high-frequency activity falls about 80% after onset everywhere, yet category and exemplar information in ventral temporal (and less robustly occipital) cortex stays decodable, time-invariant and as long as the image, while prefrontal and parietal information is a transient burst at onset that ignores duration, with no report required. It confirms the multi-duration predictions both IIT and the global neuronal workspace made for this paradigm. Sparse frontal coverage and above-threshold stimuli only. |
| LIT-646 | Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience | Block (2007), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30(5–6):481–499, with open peer commentary. To find the neural basis of experience we must decide whether it includes the machinery of cognitive access, and reports seem unable to decide that. Inference to the best explanation can. Sperling, Landman et al. and Sligte et al. show phenomenology overflowing a working memory of about four items. If the workspace is not part of the basis of phenomenology, strong losing coalitions in sensory cortex realise that overflow; the mesh between psychology and neuroscience favours that assumption. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-497); worth reading as the overflow argument and the paper that framed the methodological problem the no-report paradigm was built to solve. Phenomenology overflows cognitive access: in Sperling, Landman et al. and Sligte et al. subjects see 8–32 items and can access about 4. If the neural basis of phenomenology excludes the frontal workspace, strong but losing recurrent coalitions in the back of the head explain that overflow, and a better mesh between psychology and neuroscience is reason to accept the assumption. The target article was read; the 32 commentaries and the response were not. |
| LIT-647 v2 | Neural traveling waves in cortex: Network mechanisms and potential roles in neural computation | Muller, Busch, Davis & Reynolds (2026), Neuron 114:3156–3174. A review of neural traveling waves within single cortical areas, chiefly visual cortex: how circuits generate them, and how, by embedding sensory history in the evolving activity across a sensory map, they may implement spatiotemporal computations such as predicting upcoming input. It ends with a framework for generative processing by waves over sensory maps. Unread: registered from the abstract. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 from the PubMed abstract, keywords and the Crossref record, not read. No lawful full text could be found: the article is not open access at Cell Press (Crossref gives the accepted manuscript an Elsevier open-access licence only from 2 September 2027), it is not in PubMed Central, Europe PMC lists no preprint, arXiv has none under Muller with this title, Unpaywall and OpenAlex list no repository copy, and Semantic Scholar marks it closed. The cell.com page returned a bot challenge, which was not pursued. A human reader with subscription access, or anyone after the accepted manuscript becomes open in September 2027, could read it and move this to Active. |
| LIT-649 | Précis of The Border between Seeing and Thinking | Block (2024), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 110(1):273–283, the précis for a symposium on his 2023 book. The book’s main claim is that perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional, while cognition is paradigmatically discursive, conceptual and propositional and can use perceptual material inside a “cognitive envelope”. The global neuronal workspace is reread as the mechanism of that envelope, the conceptualisation of percepts. Nine kinds of evidence show working-memory representations differ from perceptual ones and are task-dependent abstractions, which increases Block’s doubt that “raw” percepts are used in cognition. Iconicity is defined by tracking and mirroring conditions after Shepard. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-498); worth reading as Block’s own short statement, stand-in for the book (LIT-636), of the thesis of The Border Between Seeing and Thinking: perception is constitutively iconic, nonconceptual and nonpropositional, cognition paradigmatically discursive, conceptual and propositional. Despite its title it is “an update”, and most of it develops one idea, the “cognitive envelope”: the global workspace is better read as a theory of how percepts are conceptualised than of consciousness, and recent working-memory evidence shows percepts are recoded, not held raw, when used in reasoning. It is too short to carry the book’s arguments for the main thesis, which it states but does not argue. |
| LIT-650 | Conscious birds | Maldarelli & Güntürkün (2025), Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 380:20240308. A review arguing that birds show sensory awareness (bistable perception in pigeons; crow nidopallium caudolaterale neurons that follow the reported percept, not the stimulus) and graded self-awareness (magpie and house crow mark tests; pigeons and roosters that treat their mirror image as not-a-conspecific while failing the mark test). Checked against three theories, the avian brain meets the anatomical and physiological requirements of the global neuronal workspace (a hub-and-module connectome with NCL as hub) and of recurrent processing, while IIT’s have not been tested (no PCI, no grid-like lattice found). The authors say the evidence does not yet allow a strong conclusion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-488); worth reading as a short, current statement of the case for consciousness in birds and of what each of three theories (global neuronal workspace, recurrent processing, IIT) would need to find in an avian brain. Its strongest evidence is second-hand: crow nidopallium caudolaterale neurons that track the reported percept rather than the stimulus (Nieder et al. 2020). Its sharpest argument is that the bird’s prefrontal analogue is nuclear, not laminar, so conscious report does not need cortical layering. The authors say the findings “do not allow for a strong conclusion”. |
| LIT-708 | Rarely categorical, highly separable representations along the cortical hierarchy | Posani, Wang, Muscinelli, Paninski & Fusi (2026), Nature. In the IBL Brainwide Map (about 14,000 cortical units, 43 regions, mice doing one biased-block visual decision task), neurons’ selectivity to eight task variables beats a covariance-matched Gaussian null for clustering only in VISp, AUDp and SSp-ul (4,617 selective neurons; regions with ≥ 50). Pooled modules and the whole cortex do cluster, with clusters tracking anatomy. Once conditions an area cannot tell apart are merged (5 to 16 of 16 remain), ≥ 95% of random balanced dichotomies are linearly decodable above a shuffle null in 15 of 16 analysed regions; GU is 0.82. | Active — read in full 2026-10-04 (NOTE-549); the record’s first brain-wide test of whether neurons within a cortical area come in discrete functional types or form a continuum of mixed selectivity. In mouse cortex during one overtrained decision task, a covariance-matched Gaussian null is beaten within single areas only in a few primary sensory ones, while the task conditions each area tells apart are linearly separable in nearly every balanced split. Neuron types appear when areas are pooled, and track anatomy. Second reading under ADR-013; the anthology holds it as ANTH-LIT-696, read for concept geometry in ML. |
| LIT-832 v2 | Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience | Craver (2007), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199299317.001.0001. Good explanations in neuroscience describe mechanisms; a component is constitutively relevant to a mechanism’s behaviour when it is a part of the mechanism and the two are mutually manipulable, which is distinct from causal relevance between events; neuroscience is unified as a mosaic of constraints across levels, not by reduction. Unread: registered from metadata and reviews. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-07 from Crossref’s records (monograph and chapter list) and published reviews, not read: the book is paywalled at Oxford Academic. Filed because the owner’s essay “The Organization of Will” cites it for mechanistic explanation and for the difference between constitutive and causal relevance. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied, not on merit. Retried 2026-11-01: OpenAlex lists only the paywalled Oxford Academic record and a bookseller; web searches for an author copy, chapter preprints or a copy on Craver’s Washington University pages found none, so it remains unread. |
| LIT-872 | Hyperbolic geometry of the olfactory space | Zhou, Smith & Sharpee (2018), Science Advances 4(8):eaaq1458. In four natural odour sources the rank order of correlations between compound concentrations has the clique-topology signature of points near the surface of a 3D hyperbolic ball and not of a uniform Euclidean cube, and human perceptual descriptions of 127 odorants have that of a full 3D hyperbolic ball. Pleasantness, boiling point and acidity read out as linear axes of the fitted fruit-odour space. The hierarchy that motivates the hyperbolic model is argued from biochemistry, not recovered from the data. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-672); worth reading as the first application of clique topology to stimulus statistics rather than neural data, and as the Sharpee lab’s first claim of a hyperbolic geometry in biology. For four natural odour sources (strawberry, tomato, blueberry, mouse urine; 45–78 compounds over 50–101 samples), the rank order of absolute concentration correlations gives Betti curves that match points sampled near the surface of a 3D hyperbolic ball (R_max = 7, R_min = 0.9 R_max, the same for all four) and reject uniform Euclidean cubes of any dimension tried. Human descriptor profiles for 127 odorants (Dravnieks) match a full 3D hyperbolic ball and no Euclidean cube. Linear axes for pleasantness, boiling point and acidity are found in the fitted fruit-odour space. The tree that motivates the hyperbolic model is argued, not recovered: compounds do not cluster by chemical class, and the only null geometry is a uniform Euclidean cube. |
| LIT-875 | An argument for hyperbolic geometry in neural circuits | Sharpee (2019 online), Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 58:101–104. A four-page review arguing that neural and other biological circuits should have hyperbolic geometry, because hyperbolic space approximates trees, hyperbolic networks are navigable, and Zipf’s law, read as states growing exponentially with log-improbability and taken as the mark of maximally informative, latent-driven systems, shares that exponential growth. Its evidence is the olfactory embedding of Zhou, Smith & Sharpee (2018) and earlier perception work; the Zipf-to-hyperbolic link is an analogy, not a derivation. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-670); worth reading as the short programmatic statement, by the lab behind the olfactory and hippocampal hyperbolic findings, of why hyperbolic geometry should be expected in neural circuits, and as a map of the literatures it joins: hyperbolic random graphs and greedy routing, Zipf’s law and statistical criticality, and maximally informative representations. Its own argument is a chain of analogies, not a derivation. Zipf’s law is rewritten as a count of states growing exponentially with energy (−log probability), and exponential growth of states is a hallmark of trees and of hyperbolic space, so the two are said to be connected; but exponential growth of states holds for any system with extensive entropy, and what singles out Zipf (unit slope) plays no part in the step to geometry. A rigidity argument for three dimensions cites Mostow’s theorem, which concerns finite-volume hyperbolic manifolds of every dimension ≥ 3 and says nothing about point clouds. The one piece of data, a 3D Poincaré-ball embedding of fruit odorants with a pleasantness gradient, is reproduced from Zhou, Smith & Sharpee (2018). |
| LIT-876 | Hippocampal spatial representations exhibit a hyperbolic geometry that expands with experience | Zhang, Rich, Lee & Sharpee (2022 online, Nat. Neurosci. 26, 2023). The pairwise correlations of rat dorsal CA1 place cells have the topological signature of points sampled uniformly from a three-dimensional hyperbolic ball, not of a low-dimensional Euclidean cube, and the ball’s radius grows with the logarithm of exploration time. Place-field sizes are near exponential, and in a Poisson model exponential sizes carry more positional Fisher information than uniform or log-normal ones, with an optimal radius that matches the measured one for the number of CA1 neurons. | Active — read 2026-10-09 (NOTE-668); worth reading as, on its own account, the first evidence that neural responses, not stimuli, carry a hyperbolic geometry. Pairwise spike-train correlations of a few dozen active dorsal CA1 cells per session (34 to 56 in the sessions shown), in rats on a novel 48-m track, a 2.5-m track and a 1.8-m box, give Betti curves (clique topology, invariant to any monotone transform of the correlations) that match points sampled uniformly from a 3D hyperbolic ball and fail to match uniform samples from Euclidean cubes of low dimension or shuffled spikes. The fitted radius (10.5–15.5 in units of inverse curvature) grows with the logarithm of exploration time, on scales from seconds to days, as the maximal information acquirable does. Place-field sizes are close to exponential, as the model requires, and in simulation exponentially distributed field sizes give more Fisher information than uniform or log-normal ones, with an optimal radius growing as log N that extrapolates to the radius measured. The “hierarchy” is one of nested place-field sizes; no tree is recovered from the data, and the only null geometry tested is Euclidean with uniform sampling. |
| LIT-907 v2 | The Co-ordination and Regulation of Movements | Bernstein (1967), Pergamon. The English collection of Bernstein’s work on movement: the body has more degrees of freedom than any task needs, and coordination is the mastering of redundant degrees of freedom, by organizing components into synergies rather than controlling each one. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1967; no DOI. The Internet Archive holds a copy in its controlled-lending collection (access-restricted), and another upload there of unclear provenance was not used. Filed as the origin of the degrees-of-freedom problem and of the synergy, which the coordinative structure answers. |
| LIT-912 v2 | Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the experience of flow | Dietrich (2004), Consciousness and Cognition 13: 746–761. Proposes that flow requires transient hypofrontality, a temporary suppression of the explicit system’s analytic and meta-conscious capacities, so a practised skill held by the implicit system runs without interference. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref metadata and secondary descriptions. Elsevier’s copy is closed; no author copy was looked for beyond one search. Filed because its hypothesis, that flow requires the explicit system to stand down, is the one neurocognitive account of flow that bears on the record’s claim. Reading it would place it. |
| LIT-918 v2 | Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities | Hopfield (1982), PNAS 79, 2554. Threshold units with symmetric Hebbian couplings, updated asynchronously, descend an energy function, so stored random patterns are attractors and a partial or noisy cue settles into the nearest one. In simulations at N = 30 and 100, recall degrades near 0.15N patterns, memories closer than about a tenth of N fuse, and overload makes every memory irretrievable unless old ones are forgotten. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-819) in full; worth reading as the paper that made memory a property of a flow: with symmetric couplings the asynchronous dynamics descend an energy function, Hebbian storage makes random patterns attractors, and a cue a few bits off settles into the nearest one. Read it knowing that every number in it (the 0.15N capacity, the basin width, the fusion of memories closer than about a tenth of N, the loss of all memories under overload) comes from simulations at N = 30 and 100, and that its “stable states of no obvious meaning” appear at a low load, not only past capacity. |
| LIT-921 v2 | Sparse Distributed Memory and Related Models | Kanerva (1992), RIACS TR 92.10, in Hassoun (ed.) 1993. SDM restated as a matrix memory, with the RAM as its zero-radius case, and related to correlation-matrix memories, feed-forward nets, the cerebellar cortex and the models of Marr and Albus. For uniform random data and exact cues it gives bit fidelity, the optimal activation p = (2MT)^−1/3 and a capacity near a tenth of the hard locations. Also held in the anthology as ANTH-LIT-669. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-779) in full; worth reading as the compact statement of sparse distributed memory in matrix form, with the ordinary RAM as its zero-radius special case and a simple signal-to-noise analysis: fidelity Φ(ρ) with ρ² = pM/[1 + pT(1 + p²M)], best at p = (2MT)^−1/3, and capacity near a tenth of the hard locations at fidelity 0.999. Read it knowing that every number assumes uniform random data and exact retrieval cues, that the noisy-cue case and the critical distance are not analysed here, and that it relates SDM to the Hopfield net only through a cited capacity comparison. |
| LIT-922 v2 | The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory | Hebb (1949), Wiley. The source of the postulate that when one cell repeatedly takes part in firing another, the connection between them strengthens, and of the cell assembly: a group of cells that, once wired together by repeated co-activity, can re-excite itself. Not read. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists the Psychology Press DOI, closed, and an ACM citation record; Unpaywall finds no open copy; the Taylor & Francis page returned a 403 bot check; the Internet Archive holds 1949 scans only as controlled lending (printdisabled) or as Digital Library of India uploads of an in-copyright book, neither usable; no rights-holder posting was found. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-928 v3 | Sparse Distributed Memory | Kanerva (1988), MIT Press. An associative memory in a high-dimensional binary space, addressed by content: a pattern is written to every hard location within a radius of its address and read back from the locations within that radius of a cue. Iterated reads converge on a stored pattern only from cues within a critical distance of it. Also held in the anthology as ANTH-LIT-666. Not read here. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. The book has no DOI; the MIT Press page and MIT Press Direct returned Cloudflare 403 checks, and no open-access edition was found; the Internet Archive has no scan of the book; NASA’s Technical Reports Server holds Kanerva’s public-domain RIACS and Stanford reports on SDM, which are different works (LIT-921 is one of them). What the book says about cues beyond the critical distance, which CLAIM-180 leans on, is therefore still unchecked here. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-949 v2 | A synergistic workspace for human consciousness revealed by Integrated Information Decomposition | Luppi et al. (2024), eLife 12:RP88173. Pairwise synergy and redundancy between 454 regions of resting-state fMRI (HCP, N = 100), from Gaussian integrated information decomposition, define a “synergistic workspace”. Within it, regions whose synergistic connections reach more modules than their redundant ones are gateways, mainly in the default mode network. The rest are broadcasters, mainly in the executive control network with lateral prefrontal cortex. Across propofol anaesthesia (against wakefulness and against recovery) and 22 patients with disorders of consciousness, revised integrated information ΦR falls consistently between default-mode gateway regions. The original whole-minus-sum Φ shows no common fall, and the increases near broadcasters are not robust. The evidence is correlational, pairwise and content-free. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-799) in full; worth reading as an information-theoretic operationalisation of a global workspace with distinct input and output sides. Synergy-dominant regions form the workspace; within it, gateways (mainly default mode) and broadcasters (mainly fronto-parietal) are split by participation-coefficient rank. Pairwise integrated information ΦR falls between default-mode gateways under propofol and in disorders of consciousness, where the original Φ shows no common fall. Read it knowing four things. The two-sided split is imposed by the method, and only where its classes fall is measured. All measures are pairwise, undirected resting-state BOLD, with no contents or report, so it says nothing about which consumers a content reaches. The disorders-of-consciousness group includes minimally conscious patients. The propofol sample is given as both 15 and 16. Filed as THEORY-240. |
| LIT-959 v2 | A circuit-based framework for depression: Reshaping the pathological attractor | Yuan et al. (2026). The review conceptualizes major depressive disorder as a pathological attractor, a stable, self-reinforcing network configuration kept in place by maladaptive plasticity. It argues that the depressive state comes from a hierarchical failure of top-down prefrontal control, which lets subcortical hubs stabilize and drive anhedonia and motivational deficits. It recasts treatment as reshaping the brain’s functional landscape, with rapid-acting drugs and neuromodulation steering trajectories to adaptive states. Not read. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex: closed (PubMed record only); Unpaywall: not open access; Europe PMC: no PMC copy, “Subscription required”; cell.com returned 403 to this client, failing on access, not availability, though the review is a subscription article there; no preprint was found, and a web search found only Chinese news reports of its publication (5 May 2026 online) crediting Minmin Luo’s group. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-965 v2 | Evolution of consciousness: Phylogeny, ontogeny, and emergence from general anesthesia | Mashour and Alkire (2013), a colloquium perspective. It proposes the stepwise return of consciousness after general anaesthesia as a model for studying its evolution. It reads one PET study, in which the return of a response to command correlated mainly with brainstem, hypothalamus, thalamus and anterior cingulate, as showing that conserved structures with limited recurrent cortex suffice for primitive consciousness. By homology, it concludes that early mammals and birds are phenomenally conscious. The marker of return is an access marker, which the authors concede. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-797) in full; worth reading as a clear statement of the case for animal consciousness from anaesthesia and comparative anatomy: the return of a response to command after anaesthesia correlates mainly with brainstem, thalamus and anterior cingulate, so ancient conserved structures with limited recurrent cortex are taken to suffice, and early mammals and birds are taken to be phenomenally conscious. Read it knowing that it is a perspective with no data of its own, that its marker of returning consciousness is an access marker (which it concedes), and that the step to other species is by homology, not by anaesthesia evidence from them. No THEORY was filed from it; THEORY-091 holds the limit it illustrates. |
| LIT-973 v2 | Adversarial testing of global neuronal workspace and integrated information theories of consciousness | Cogitate Consortium, Ferrante et al. (2025). A preregistered adversarial collaboration testing IIT against GNWT in 256 people (fMRI, MEG, iEEG) viewing clearly seen images. Posterior cortex held category, identity and orientation. Prefrontal cortex held category only, at onset, with no response at offset, against GNWT. Content-specific posterior synchronization with V1/V2 was brief and low-frequency, not sustained gamma, against IIT. It tests the theories’ proposed implementations, not their cores, and never separates percept from stimulus. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-812) in full; worth reading as the first preregistered adversarial test of two theories of consciousness, and for what it found: prefrontal cortex held a seen image’s category but not its identity or (detectably) orientation, no prefrontal site responded at stimulus offset, and sustained content-specific gamma synchronization within posterior cortex, IIT’s distinctive prediction, was absent. Read it knowing that every image was clearly seen, so nothing separates experience from stimulus processing or access, that it tests each theory’s proposed implementation rather than its core, and that the proponents’ replies are in the Supplementary Information, not read here. THEORY-245 and THEORY-296 hold what it shows. |
| LIT-982 v2 | Theories of consciousness | Seth and Bayne (2022). A review of higher-order, global workspace, integrated information, and reentry and predictive processing theories, sorted by which aspects of consciousness each explains, where in the brain each locates it and what evidence each cites. Many apparent rivalries are differences of target. The front-versus-back dispute is about consciousness and cognitive access, and posterior-sufficiency predictions cannot now be tested because verification relies on report, which needs anterior activity. It asks for precise, comprehensive theories and a solution to the measurement problem. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-849) in full; worth reading for QUESTION-048 as a map of four families of theory by what each explains and what evidence each cites, and for its argument that report-based evidence cannot test posterior sufficiency, since report needs anterior activity, while no non-report marker has a validation independent of introspection and contested theory. Read it knowing that it is a review, read from the accepted manuscript, which argues these limits rather than demonstrating them. |
| LIT-983 v2 | Impaired context disambiguation as a key determinant of post-traumatic psychopathology: A neurocomputational account | Linson et al. (2025), bioRxiv; read in version 2. Recasts PTSD as a failure of context disambiguation rather than of fear extinction. In an active-inference model, an overly precise prior that one is in a harmful context makes peripheral sampling look uninformative, so the agent attenuates it and the prior sustains itself. Illustrative simulations show the loop in a “vulnerable” agent, recovery under exposure, and relapse after a precision-lowering drug. No data are fitted; the neuromodulatory circuit it proposes is not modelled. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-766) in full, in version 2 (2025-08-04); version 3 (2026-05-13) could not be reached, as bioRxiv returned HTTP 429 to every request. Worth reading as a worked mechanism of a disorder that keeps itself in place: under active inference an overly precise prior for a harmful context makes exploring the periphery look uninformative, so the agent attenuates it, never gets the corrective evidence, and the belief sustains itself; exposure that restores sampling rebalances it, and a precision-lowering drug only suppresses symptoms. Read it knowing that every result is an illustrative simulation with unreported parameters, and that its two intervention arms differ in environment as well as mechanism. THEORY-285 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-992 v2 | How the conception of control influences our understanding of actions | Floegel et al. (2023). The Perspective contrasts two ways of modelling human motor control. Plant control treats neural computation as generating commands that move the musculoskeletal plant into a desired state. Perceptual control treats movement as emerging in a coupled agent–environment system from the pursuit of perceptual goals. The paper argues that the choice of perspective shapes how empirical data are modelled and so how actions are understood. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from the owner’s papers-feed, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed and lists a HAL record (hal-04076959), but the HAL API shows it is a notice with no file deposited. Unpaywall reports no open copy. The Nature Reviews Neuroscience page offers only paid access. Europe PMC holds the PubMed record (PMID 36997716) with no full text. Searches for a preprint, an accepted manuscript or a copy on the authors’ pages found none, and Goethe University Frankfurt’s repository search found no deposit. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. The claim in the body, that it sets plant control against coupled-dynamics control at the motor scale for QUESTION-054, is from the abstract. |
| LIT-996 v2 | It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function | Theriault et al. (2025), Neuron 113(24):4107–4133. A review arguing that the brain’s core function is allostasis, the predictive regulation of competing bodily demands, rather than thinking. Its evidence: an intrinsic system of visceromotor and interoceptive regions that reproduces tract-traced anatomy and contains the default-mode and salience hubs; a limbic-to-sensory laminar gradient read as a prediction hierarchy; and respiratory, cardiac and vagal effects on brain-wide signalling. It hypothesises that cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease trades cognition for waste clearance and pH. The authors do not claim the hypothesis is correct. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-761) in full; worth reading as the Barrett group’s current case that the brain’s core function is allostasis: an intrinsic system of visceromotor and interoceptive regions that matches tract-traced anatomy and contains the default-mode and salience hubs, a limbic-to-sensory laminar gradient read as a prediction hierarchy, interoceptive rhythms shaping brain-wide signalling, and a hypothesis that cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s disease is an allostatic trade-off. Read it knowing that it is a review of mostly the group’s own work, that the authors do not claim the allostasis-first hypothesis is correct, and that it says nothing about why or whether allostatic states are felt. |
| LIT-998 v2 | A measure for brain complexity: relating functional segregation and integration in the nervous system. | Tononi, Sporns & Edelman (1994). Introduces neural complexity C_N: the summed shortfall of average subset integration below a linear rise with subset size, equivalently the average mutual information between a subset and the rest, summed over sizes. For one family of Gaussian matrices it is low when components are independent or uniformly dependent and high in between. In one simulated visual area, and in small linear systems, patchy grouped connectivity gives higher C_N than the same connections spread uniformly. All results are simulation; C_N is one number for a system with fixed components and finds no units. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-767) in full; worth reading as the origin of neural complexity C_N, the summed average mutual information between a subset and the rest of a system, low when parts are independent or uniformly dependent and high when they are segregated in small subsets and integrated in large ones. Read it knowing that every result is simulation, that C_N is one number over components fixed in advance with no boundary or threshold, and that its oneness test (no bipartition with zero mutual information) is the unpriced limit of the gap test QUESTION-042 asks about. THEORY-262 holds what it shows. |
| LIT-1000 v2 | Does neural computation feel like something? | Gidon, Aru and Larkum (2025), Frontiers in Neuroscience 19:1511972. A five-neuron NEURON simulation is replayed into itself by a voltage clamp. On the matching stimulus the clamp injects no current, yet it makes every state transition independent of the input. On the Turing–Putnam definition the computation degenerates while activity and actual causal interactions are unchanged, so computational functionalism must say that doing nothing can alter consciousness. The authors offer this as a paradox for the view, not a refutation, and close by suggesting that substrate-fixed “natural counterfactuals” matter instead. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-818) in full; worth reading as the counterfactual problem for computational functionalism made concrete: a simulated voltage clamp replaying a recorded response stays idle on the matching stimulus yet removes every other transition, so on the Turing–Putnam definition the computation changes while no activity does. Read it knowing that the simulation shows only what an ideal clamp does, that the verdict on consciousness follows from a cited premise rather than from the model, and that it concerns consciousness in general, not affect. |
| LIT-1009 v2 | Sense of agency in the human brain | Haggard (2017). A review of the sense of agency, taken narrowly as the experience of controlling a specific motor act and, through it, an external outcome. It reviews explicit judgements, which are biased, and implicit measures such as intentional binding. It argues that the experience is not only computed retrospectively, as comparator models have it, but also prospectively, from action selection and outcome prediction, and that psychosis removes the prospective part. It proposes frontal–parietal connectivity, not a single comparator site, as the neural correlate, and reports that coercive instruction reduces the sense of agency. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-827) in full; worth reading as a compact map of the experimental study of the sense of agency in its narrow, motor sense: the experience of controlling a specific act and its outcome, set apart from self-efficacy and from the social attribution of authorship. Read it as a review by an author whose group ran most of the studies it reports, with no effect sizes given. Its distinctive claim is that the experience has a prospective component, from action selection and outcome prediction, that psychosis seems to remove; its most quotable result is that coercive instruction reduces the implicit sense of agency. |
| LIT-1055 | Contributions of ideal observer theory to vision research | Geisler (2011), Vision Research 51(7). A short review, not a methods paper. It defines the ideal observer as the device that “performs a given task at the optimal level possible, given the available information and any specified constraints”, writes the Bayesian ideal as an argmax of expected utility over the posterior given either the stimulus S or a constrained neural representation Z = g(S;θ) (eq. 1), and surveys applications from photon-noise detection to eye-movement search. It gives no formula for efficiency and no procedure for locating information loss beyond saying that constraints are added to the ideal one at a time (optics, receptor sampling, receptor noise, ganglion-cell summation) and that models are built by “degrading the ideal observer with hypothesized neural noise or with hypothesized heuristic computations”. Its constraints restrict the information available to an optimal decoder; it has no notion of an optimum over a restricted class of computations, though its attention examples compare the ideal with specific suboptimal rules (a one-location “serial” mechanism, a MAP searcher, a random searcher). | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC3062724, NIHMS252298), taken as JATS XML from NCBI E-utilities (eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/efetch.fcgi?db=pmc&id=3062724) because the PMC article page served a reCAPTCHA; the typeset Elsevier open-archive PDF returned 403, so printed pagination was not checked. Worth reading as a compact statement of Bayesian ideal observer analysis: the ideal is optimal “given the available information and any specified constraints”, written as an expected-utility argmax over the posterior given either the stimulus or a constrained neural representation Z = g(S;θ), with a survey of applications and some numbers (r = 0.83 for colour naming on individual cone mosaics; 42% lower MSE for a natural-statistics decoder of peripheral samples; about 99% of variance in contour-occlusion judgments). For QUESTION-103 it shows less than the question assumes: it gives no formula for efficiency (the squared d′ ratio is not stated here and should be cited to Burgess et al. 1981 or Pelli and Farell 1999, or owned by the record), and its constrained ideals restrict the input, a garbling of the stimulus, with unrestricted computation on it, so losses are located stage by stage by the data-processing logic, not by an optimum over a restricted class of observers as in CLAIM-302. Its nearest analogue to a bounded class is the comparison with named heuristic rules (serial one-location attention, MAP fixation selection), and its remark that far-below-ideal performance leaves many models standing is the empirical form of the point that a gap does not identify its cause. Consistent with THEORY-031; no bearing on CLAIM-302 itself. |
| LIT-1075 | Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition | Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook and Rao (1997), BBS 20(4). At about a third of a second, the time scale of a saccade, the article models fixation as a pointer that binds a variable in a behavioural program to a place in the world, so that what is bound is only the task-relevant feature, fetched just before use. In a block-copying task subjects looked back at the model about 1.3 times per block on average, the commonest cycle being two looks per block (one apparently for colour, one for position), and chose this slowest, lowest-memory strategy (about 3 s a block, against about 1.5 s for copying from memory) though told to be fast; separating model and copy by 70° cut looks to 1.0 per block, and one-colour patterns that could be chunked cut them to 0.7. The authors read this as working memory having a “carrying cost” that exceeds the cost of re-acquiring from the world, but that cost is inferred from the choices and never measured or modelled, and the evidence is one task with small samples (seven subjects for the main data, three for the colour-change experiment) and no statistics reported in the article. What is left in the world is unprocessed input, not a computed result, and the article argues against precomputation where the needed products cannot be foreseen. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 (the target article, pp. 723–742; the open peer commentaries and the authors’ response, pp. 742–767, not read) from the typeset BBS PDF posted on Dana Ballard’s University of Texas page (www.cs.utexas.edu/~dana/bbs.pdf; the same file is on Rajesh Rao’s University of Washington page). Unpaywall and OpenAlex report the DOI closed. Worth reading as the founding statement of fixation as a pointer that binds a program variable to a place in the world at about a third of a second, and for the block-copying evidence that people re-look rather than memorize: about 1.3 looks at the model per block, the slowest lowest-memory strategy (about 3 s a block, against 1.5 s from memory) chosen most often under instructions to be fast, falling to 1.0 when looking is made dearer (70° separation) and 0.7 when patterns can be chunked. For QUESTION-095 it shows the trade stated as a cost comparison (“carrying cost” of working memory against on-line acquisition) that moves with both costs, but the cost is inferred from choice, not measured or modelled, what is left in the world is raw input rather than a computed result, and the authors argue against precomputing where needs are unpredictable, so it is the deferral policy opposite to the cockpit’s, not amortization; for TERM-055 it shows people choosing between internal and external sources by their relative retrieval cost, and moving retrieval later, not earlier; for CLAIM-298 it offers only an analogy (cue-driven matching, the same image read differently by task step) and no test of framing or judgement. |
| LIT-1132 v2 | Irruption Theory in Phase Transitions: A Proof of Concept With the Haken-Kelso-Bunz Model | Sánchez-Cañizares (2024). Uses the Haken–Kelso–Bunz model to illustrate phase transitions that change the number of a system’s attractors, as a proof of concept for irruption theory. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-29 for a lawful full text and none was reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex (2026-10-29) reports it closed, with no repository copy; Crossref lists only Sage’s text-and-data-mining licence and the Sage PDF and XML, which are subscription access, and journals.sagepub.com returned 403 to this client. The Universidad de Navarra research portal (portalcientifico.unav.edu, document 6678c8b53974ce515cb01bfc) holds a metadata record with no full text and no Dadun deposit; Dadun’s own search API returned 403, so a deposit there was not ruled out. Europe PMC has no record, and web searches found no preprint, PhilArchive or PhilSci copy, or author-posted copy. The author’s 2026 follow-up, “Decision-making through irruption theory: how to use and interpret the Haken-Kelso-Bunz model” (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, doi 10.1007/s11097-026-10164-0), is listed as open access and may cover the same ground; it is not this work. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1145 v2 | Linking fast and slow: The case for generative models | Medrano, Friston & Zeidman (2024). A review arguing that multiscale neuronal time series are best tested with hierarchical generative models whose levels are slower timescales, licensed by centre-manifold and adiabatic reduction (Haken’s slaving principle, illustrated by the HKB model in prose) and compared by free energy; adiabatic DCM is the worked example. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1383) in full, in the version of record (Europe PMC, CC BY); worth reading as a primer on testing slow change in fast neuronal data with hierarchical generative models, each level a slower timescale, justified by centre-manifold and adiabatic reduction and compared by variational free energy, with adiabatic DCM as the example. Read it knowing that it is a review of its authors’ methods, that it states the slaving principle and the Haken–Kelso–Bunz model in a paragraph each with no equations, that its levels are slower by the modeller’s construction, and that its extension of the slaving principle to HMMs is asserted. |
| LIT-1158 v4 | A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem | Dasgupta, Stevens & Navlakha (2017), Science 358(6364): 793–796. The fly olfactory circuit assigns an odour a tag by a sparse binary random projection from about 50 glomeruli to about 2,000 Kenyon cells, then keeps the top 5% by winner-take-all. Read as locality-sensitive hashing, this beats standard LSH on nearest-neighbour search benchmarks. Unread. | Unfetched — unread, registered 2026-10-14 for QUESTION-120. A reading was attempted on 2026-10-14 and failed on access, not availability: the bioRxiv preprint (10.1101/180471, CC BY-NC-ND) returned HTTP 429 to this client on six tries over twenty minutes, Europe PMC’s full text for it (PPR21674) returned 500, and the Science author referrer link on Dasgupta’s UCSD page returned 403. Science itself is paywalled and OpenAlex lists no other open copy. A browser fetch of the bioRxiv PDF would unblock it. |
| LIT-1178 v2 | Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State | Owen, Coleman, Boly, Davis, Laureys & Pickard (2006). A 23-year-old woman who met the clinical criteria for the vegetative state five months after a traumatic brain injury, told in the scanner to imagine playing tennis or walking through her house, activated the supplementary motor area for the first and parahippocampal, posterior parietal and lateral premotor cortex for the second, as 12 healthy volunteers did. The authors take her compliance as “a clear act of intention” showing awareness; her intact speech responses they set aside as not evidence of it. No question was asked or answered. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-962) in full, the one-page Brevia; the Supporting Online Material was not reached. Worth reading as the first showing that a patient diagnosed vegetative can respond to command by a mental act with no motor output, read from the brain. Read it knowing that no question was asked and no answer decoded, that the comparison with controls is qualitative in the main text, and that “confirmed beyond any doubt” is the authors’ assertion. |
| LIT-1181 v2 | Action and behavior: a free-energy formulation | Friston, Daunizeau, Kilner & Kiebel (2010). If an agent’s existence requires a low-entropy density over its states, an ergodic assumption makes that entropy the time-average of surprise, and the setup stipulates that only action changes the hidden states the agent senses; so action as well as perception must minimize a free-energy bound on surprise. Action is absent from the generative model and descends on sensory prediction error, so motor control is the fulfilment of proprioceptive (and visual) predictions. Simulations of oculomotor stabilization and prior-driven saccades, cued reaching, a mountain car learned passively in a designed environment, and Lorenz trajectories show unexpected perturbations cancelled by action and not perceived. The model is held fixed and the data re-sampled to fit it. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-960) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF; worth reading as the first full statement that action, like perception, minimizes a free-energy bound on sensory surprise, by fulfilling proprioceptive and visual predictions, with simulations of oculomotor stabilization and saccades, cued reaching, mountain-car and Lorenz trajectories. Read it knowing that the “ergodic arguments” of the abstract only equate entropy with time-averaged surprise, and that action is needed because the setup stipulates that action is the only way the agent changes the hidden states it senses; that action here pulls the sensed world toward a fixed model, sampling “what one expects to experience”, and cancels unexpected perturbations so they are not perceived; and that the paper answers the worry about confirming a wrong model by appeal to existence (“agents who do not have the right priors cannot exist”). It has no mental or covert action. |
| LIT-1183 v2 | A survey on self-assessed well-being in a cohort of chronic locked-in syndrome patients: happy majority, miserable minority | Bruno et al. (2011). Of 168 members of the French LIS association invited, 91 replied and 65 gave usable answers, with a proxy’s help: 47 (72%) rated their present life at or above the midpoint between their best period before LIS and their worst ever (median +3), 18 below (median −4). All had chronic LIS after a brainstem vascular accident, a median of 8 years before; 55% had recovered some speech and 70% some limb movement. Happiness was associated with years in LIS (OR 1.5 per year), recovered speech (OR 20.5) and absence of anxiety (OR 0.19). 58% did not wish to be resuscitated; 7% wished for euthanasia. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-961) in full, from the open-access version in PubMed Central. Worth reading as the largest survey of chronic locked-in patients’ own ratings of their lives: 47 of 65 rated their present life at or above the midpoint between their best period before LIS and their worst ever, and happiness rose with years in LIS, recovered speech and absence of anxiety. Read it knowing that it is a self-selected association sample (54% response, 26 more excluded) answering with a proxy’s help, that most respondents had recovered some speech or limb movement, and that the authors expect its biases to overstate well-being. |
| LIT-1184 v2 | Factorized embedding of goal and uncertainty in the lateral prefrontal cortex guides stably flexible learning | Sung, Rigotti & Lee (2025). A reanalysis of 20 people’s fMRI from a two-stage Markov task with experimenter-cued goals and uncued block-wise transition noise. With a specific goal cued, transition noise did not lower choice optimality or consistency. Unfitted model-free agents showed a flexibility–stability trade-off (r = −0.964) that model-based agents and humans did not. Goals and, under specific goals only, transition uncertainty were weakly decodable from vlPFC, dlPFC and OFC. Nonlinear dichotomies decoded worse than goal and linear ones, and a goal decoder transferred across noise levels: the paper’s “factorized embedding”. Across subjects, goal separability and transfer in lateral PFC correlated with flexibility and performance; uncertainty separability correlated with nothing. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-953) in full from the open-access article, with the supplementary tables for the shattering comparisons and the brain–behaviour correlations. Worth reading as a clear human-fMRI application of Bernardi et al.’s geometry tests (shattering dimensionality, cross-condition generalization) to goals and transition noise. Read it knowing that it is a reanalysis of 20 subjects with effects a few points above chance; that “uncertainty” is block-wise transition noise, coded only when a specific goal is cued; that it tested only whether the goal code is invariant to uncertainty, never the converse; that the task is action–outcome learning with experimenter-cued goals; and that goal-code invariance does not correlate with stability once corrected for multiple comparisons, although the main text says it does. Registered at the owner’s request (U9 of the exchange of 2026-10-16 on active inference). |
| LIT-1185 v2 | Map-like representations of emotion knowledge in hippocampal-prefrontal systems | Ma & Kragel (2026). In fMRI of 29 people passively watching 14 emotional films (Emo-FilM), decoders predicted an independent online sample’s consensus ratings of 13 emotion categories better from hippocampus than positions in a two-dimensional affective space (an MDS of rating co-occurrence), and vmPFC the reverse; posterior hippocampus carried finer distinctions. Brain patterns could also be decoded into a Tolman–Eichenbaum Machine that learned the emotion grid by random walk, hippocampus favouring its small-scale conjunctive layer and vmPFC its large-scale structural layer. Prediction–outcome correlations are about 0.04–0.10; no learning in the participants is measured. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-950) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF, supplementary material not read; worth reading as a naturalistic-viewing fMRI dissociation in which hippocampus carries more about emotion categories and vmPFC more about positions in a two-dimensional affective space, lined up with the two layers of the Tolman–Eichenbaum Machine. Read it knowing that participants only watched; that the decoded emotions are an independent sample’s consensus ratings; that the effects are small; that the “transitions” are a model’s random-walk steps on a grid built from rating co-occurrence; and that no learning in people, and no effect of the map on later reading, is measured. The model that learns the map does so by acting. |
| LIT-1191 v2 | Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference | Sandved-Smith, Hesp, Mattout, Friston, Lutz & Ramstead (2021). A three-level discrete active-inference model: attentional states (focused, distracted) set the precision of the perceptual likelihood, and meta-awareness states (high, low) set the precision with which the agent observes its own attentional state. Mental action is a policy, ‘stay’ or ‘switch’, over attentional states, defined at that level only and driven by a preference to observe oneself ‘focused’. Single simulations of a passive oddball reproduce focus, mind-wandering, noticing and refocusing, with longer mind-wandering under low meta-awareness. Stimuli are fixed by the generative process, so mental action changes how strongly they update belief, not what they are; no likelihood is learned. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-958) in full, from the PubMed Central deposit of the journal version; worth reading as the active-inference model of mental action: attentional states set the precision of the perceptual likelihood, meta-awareness states set the precision of the attentional likelihood, and the agent selects ‘stay’ or ‘switch’ over its own attentional state against a preference to observe itself ‘focused’, reproducing the cycle of focus, mind-wandering and refocusing. Read it knowing that action is defined at the attentional level only; that the agent’s attentional state is modelled as a generative process the mental action acts on, so the loop is action and perception one level inward; that the perceptual observations are fixed in advance and mental action changes only their precision; that nothing is learned; and that the results are single illustrative simulations with no data fitted. |
| LIT-1192 v2 | Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness | Monti et al. (2010). Of 54 patients diagnosed vegetative (23) or minimally conscious (31), 5, all with traumatic injury, produced task-specific fMRI activity to motor and spatial imagery commands; 4 had been admitted as vegetative, and 2 of those showed no behavioural sign of awareness at the bedside even after the scans were known. Using one imagery for yes and the other for no, 16 controls answered 48 of 48 questions correctly, and one patient, 5 years after injury, answered 5 of 6 autobiographical questions correctly, scored blind, the sixth giving no signal. That patient showed inconsistent signs of a minimally conscious state on retesting but could not communicate at the bedside. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-964) in full, without the Supplementary Appendix. Worth reading as the study that made imagery-to-command a yes/no channel and found command-following in 5 of 54 patients diagnosed by behaviour. Read it knowing that only one patient was asked questions, that he showed inconsistent signs of a minimally conscious state on retesting, and that the two responders with no bedside behaviour were not asked questions. |
| LIT-1193 v2 | Le scaphandre et le papillon | Bauby (1997). A memoir of classic locked-in syndrome after a brainstem stroke, dictated letter by letter by blinking the left eyelid as Claude Mendibil, sent by the publisher, read out an alphabet ordered by French letter frequency that his speech therapist had devised. Published two days before Bauby’s death on 9 March 1997. English: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16, not read; a lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-16 and none exists to reach: the book is in copyright (Bauby died in 1997) and sold, not given, by Robert Laffont (laffont.fr product page, ISBN 978-2-221-08172-3). Looked at: the publisher’s page (sale only); Open Library, whose one 1997 Laffont edition is an Internet Archive scan (lescaphandreetle0000baub) that is access-restricted, lending and print-disabled only, not usable here; HathiTrust (no record for ISBN 2-221-08172-2); Gallica and Google Books (refused or empty to this client; in copyright in any case). A publisher preview would not be a reading. Registered from the exchange of 2026-10-16 on active inference and locked-in syndrome (the workbench entry of 2026-10-16). No NOTE is filed. The publication date and the dictation method were checked against secondary sources (history, version 2). |
| LIT-1194 v2 | Neuronal dynamics, timing, and flow of sensory and choice-related information in auditory-prefrontal circuitry | Giarrocco & Averbeck (2026). In 37 sessions of simultaneous recordings from A1 and dorsolateral PFC of two macaques reporting by bar release whether two tones came from the same side, a lagged-regression (Granger-style) analysis of one-dimensional task projections found cue-side information flowing one way, A1 to PFC (onset about 120–147 ms after the cue), and choice information (release or hold) flowing first PFC to A1 (onset 315–365 ms after the target) and then A1 to PFC (352–419 ms), both directions peaking near 500 ms, close to the response. Within a trial and correlational; decision and motor response are not separated. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-947) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF, supplementary material not read; worth reading as a within-trial measurement, from simultaneous A1 and dorsolateral PFC ensembles, that cue information flows A1 to PFC only while choice information flows PFC to A1 and then back. Read it knowing that the choice is the monkey’s bar release or hold and the flow peaks near the response, so decision and motor preparation are not separated (the authors say so); that the flow measure is a Granger-style lagged regression on one-dimensional projections, correlational and with other areas unrecorded; that the PFC-to-A1 choice signal arrives after the 300 ms target has ended; and that nothing crosses trials, so it shows no reshaping of A1’s later sensory coding. |
| LIT-1195 v2 | Attention or salience? | Parr & Friston (2019). A short review. Attention as gain control weights currently available sensory data by the estimated precision of the mapping from their causes; salience is the expected information gain of an action, typically a saccade, that would acquire new data. They are distinct, with gain failures giving hallucinations and salience failures neglect, but coupled: a saccade is a prediction that the foveated location will be sensed precisely, so covert attention to a place biases an overt saccade there, which the authors take to support the premotor theory. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-956) in full, from the authors’ accepted manuscript on UCL Discovery; worth reading as the short statement, within active inference, that attentional gain (the estimated precision of currently available data) and salience (the expected information gain of an action that would acquire new data, usually a saccade) are distinct computations with distinct disorders, hallucination and neglect, and that they are coupled because a saccade is a prediction of high precision at the location foveated. Read it knowing that it is a five-page review with no new data or simulations; that it assigns covert spatial attention to gain by stipulation; that it never treats gain as an action; and that it ends by endorsing the premotor theory, so covert attention changes what is observed only by biasing overt saccades. |
| LIT-1198 v2 | The locked-in syndrome: what is it like to be conscious but paralyzed and voiceless? | Laureys et al. (2005). A review of locked-in syndrome: its definition, its classic, incomplete and total forms, and what is known of patients’ experience and cognition. Not read; from what the work is standardly cited for. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-16; on 2026-10-16 a search for a lawful full text reached none, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. ORBi, the University of Liège repository, holds the file (orbi.uliege.be/handle/2268/9572, 433.pdf) but in restricted access: the bitstream link returns a request-a-copy form (“not currently available on open access”). The Coma Science Group’s publication page (coma.uliege.be) links only to that ORBi record. OpenAlex lists the work as closed with no repository full text; Unpaywall reports it closed; Europe PMC has no full text (PMID 16186044, not in PMC); ScienceDirect returned 403; the ULB DI-fusion record (dipot 2013/51666) offers no file; a web search found no author-posted copy. ORBi’s request form could deliver a copy to a named requester, which the owner can use. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1199 v2 | Brain–computer interfaces and communication in paralysis: Extinction of goal directed thinking in completely paralysed patients? | Kübler & Birbaumer (2008). Across 35 patients trained with EEG BCIs, paralysis explained performance (η² = .40) only because of the seven in the completely locked-in state, none of whom, having entered training already in CLIS, reached yes/no communication; without them η² = .12, n.s. Evoked potentials showed hearing and some semantic processing intact. The authors propose that lost perception of the contingency between a response and its consequences, with reward blunted by artificially held homeostasis, extinguishes goal-directed thinking; predict that a contingency learned before CLIS and carried into it should prevent this; and say one CLIS patient who learns to communicate would disprove it. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-948) in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central. Worth reading as the source of the extinction hypothesis for the completely locked-in state: none of seven patients who began BCI training already in CLIS reached yes/no communication, and the authors propose that losing the perceived contingency between a response and its consequences, with reward blunted by artificially held homeostasis, extinguishes goal-directed thinking while passive sensory processing stays intact. Read it knowing that the hypothesis rests on seven heterogeneous patients and an analogy with curarized rats whose result failed to replicate, that it is stated as “might be responsible”, and that it predicts its own exception: a contingency learned before CLIS and carried into it should prevent extinction. |
| LIT-1200 v2 | Spelling interface using intracortical signals in a completely locked-in patient enabled via auditory neurofeedback training | Chaudhary et al. (2022). A man with ALS who had used an eye-movement BCI with an auditory speller until February 2019, and was judged completely locked-in from a few weeks before implantation, was given two microelectrode arrays in motor cortex in March 2019. Attempted and imagined movements gave no usable signal; from day 86 he learned to move an auditory tone driven by firing rate, and from day 106 spelled with the speller he had used before CLIS, producing intelligible sentences on 44 of 107 attempted days at about one character per minute. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-951) in full, from the open-access article at nature.com; the Supplementary Information was not read. Worth reading as the one report of a patient classed as completely locked-in who spelled self-chosen sentences through a BCI, by learning to raise or lower motor-cortex firing rates against an auditory tone after attempted and imagined movements gave no usable signal. Read it knowing that he had used an eye-movement BCI with the same speller until weeks before CLIS, that he had been in CLIS for weeks rather than years, that control was intermittent (intelligible output on 44 of 107 days) and rated by the authors, and that the authors concede residual muscle control was not excluded. As published, the article carries no editor’s note, correction, expression of concern or retraction (nature.com and Crossref, 2026-10-16). |
| LIT-1211 v2 | The phenomenal binding problem for neural networks | Percy & Agarwal (2026). A deliberately simple artificial neural network can implement functional binding but not phenomenal binding while keeping the distinctions between unconscious and conscious processing, which the authors use to structure the options for how phenomenal binding could be implemented. | Unfetched — filed 2026-10-18, not read. A lawful free copy exists and this client could not fetch it (2026-10-29). OpenAlex lists the article as hybrid open access under CC BY-NC-ND at the publisher, and Crossref gives the licence and the ScienceDirect PII S1053810026000115. The page https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810026000115 and its pdfft download returned HTTP 403 to curl and WebFetch, and Elsevier’s API needs a key. Europe PMC has the PubMed record (PMID 41637896) with no full text; no preprint was found. A browser fetch of the ScienceDirect copy is the cheapest way to read it. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1215 v2 | Towards a Neuronal Gauge Theory | Sengupta, Tozzi, Cooray, Douglas & Friston (2016). An essay proposing that variational free-energy minimization be cast as a gauge theory. The only connection it names is the Levi-Civita connection of the Fisher metric on the manifold of a belief’s sufficient statistics, so its gauge freedom is reparameterization; it reads attention as precision weighting forced by that manifold’s curvature. No gauge group or invariant Lagrangian is specified. | Active — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1350) in full, from the PLOS Biology PDF and its supporting information (prose; the supplements’ equations did not extract); worth reading as the source for the claim that free-energy minimization is a gauge theory, and for what that claim comes to: Riemannian descent on a belief manifold whose connection is the Levi-Civita connection of the Fisher metric. Read it knowing that it is an essay with no gauge group, invariant Lagrangian or derived field, that its gauge freedom is reparameterization, and that it contains errors on curvature and on what a gauge field is. |
| LIT-1249 v3 | Slow Feature Analysis: Unsupervised Learning of Invariances | Wiskott & Sejnowski (2002). Learns instantaneous functions of the input whose outputs vary as slowly as possible, minimizing ⟨ẏ²⟩ under zero-mean, unit-variance and decorrelation constraints, solved in closed form within a fixed (usually quadratic) expansion by sphering and taking the smallest eigenvectors of the derivative covariance. Stacked modules in a 1-D model of the visual hierarchy learn translation, size, rotation, contrast and, less well, illumination invariance from the training stimulus, with location (“where”) among the slowest outputs alongside identity (“what”). | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-971) in full, from Wiskott’s own PostScript preprint; worth reading for the slowness objective stated exactly (minimize ⟨ẏ²⟩ under zero mean, unit variance and decorrelation), for its closed-form solution within a fixed nonlinear expansion by sphering and an eigendecomposition of the derivative covariance (THEORY-746), and for the demonstration that stacked modules learn translation, size, rotation, contrast and, less well, illumination invariance for 1-D patterns from the training stimulus alone. Read it knowing that optimality holds per module, on the training signal and within the chosen function space, and not for the greedy hierarchy; that “slower is more abstract” is its premise, not a finding, so a stack built this way is slower at higher stages by construction; that the slowest outputs include location, so slowness is not invariance; that no generative model and no learning dynamics appear; and that every stimulus is synthetic and one-dimensional. |
| LIT-1262 v2 | The free-energy self: A predictive coding account of self-recognition | Apps & Tsakiris (2014; online 2013), Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 41:85–97. Self-recognition is recast under the free-energy principle: one’s own body is “the most likely to be ‘me’”, represented as a high-level, multimodal empirical prior learned from correlations between vision, touch, proprioception, corollary discharge and interoception, and “the notion that there is a ‘self’ is the most parsimonious and accurate explanation for sensory inputs”. The rubber hand, enfacement and rubber-voice illusions become one effect: synchronous stimulation leaves surprise that multimodal areas explain away by raising the probability that the other hand, face or voice is “me” and lowering it for one’s own. Context (a non-corporeal object, a misplaced hand, culture) acts as a prior. Three anatomical predictions are drawn: no unimodal area is self-specific; multimodal areas (TPJ, anterior insula, IPS, IFG) are engaged but not self-specific; predicted self-stimuli suppress activity. The authors concede there is “little direct evidence” for the account. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-991) in full; worth reading as the first statement of the predictive-processing account of self-recognition and body ownership: one’s own face, voice and body are recognised as “me” because a high-level, multimodal prior makes them the most probable cause of correlated input across the senses, and the rubber hand, enfacement and “rubber voice” illusions are that prior being updated when synchronous multisensory stimulation leaves surprise to explain away. Read it as a theoretical review that, by its authors’ own account, rests on evidence that “neither largely supports nor refutes” it: no data, no model, no simulation, and predictions they call hard to falsify with standard fMRI. |
| LIT-1263 v2 | Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | Seth (2013), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11):565–573, an Opinion article. Emotions are “interoceptive inference”: felt states are the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, compared with bottom-up prediction errors in the anterior insula. Prediction errors are also cancelled by action, as descending predictions set the reference points of autonomic reflexes, the visceral counterpart of active inference in motor control. The same scheme is applied to the experience of body ownership. The rubber hand illusion is a revision of the multisensory self-model under precision-weighted error. Low interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to it, and a virtual hand pulsing in time with the heartbeat is owned more. No direct test of the model is claimed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1000); worth reading as the short statement that put emotion and body ownership under one predictive-coding mechanism: felt emotion is the content of top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, the anterior insula is the comparator, and the experience of body ownership is what the brain infers to be “most likely to be me” from interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. It is an opinion article with no new data. Its evidence is indirect and cited, and its one figure is a study by the author’s own group, an augmented-reality rubber hand illusion whose virtual hand flashed in or out of time with the heartbeat. The record’s bridge from its interoception cluster to body ownership. |
| LIT-1264 | No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Ehrsson, Fotopoulou, Radziun, Longo & Tsakiris (2022), Nat Commun 13:564, a Matters Arising on Lush et al. (2020). Reanalysing the open data of all 353 participants, they find no relationship between hypnotisability and the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7) or in proprioceptive drift (rho = 0.047, BF01 = 1.7), a significant synchrony effect in every hypnotisability quartile, and no effect of explicit suggestions about which condition should work. The correlations Lush et al. report hold as much for the asynchronous condition and for an “impossible” visual hallucination item, so they read hypnotisability as a general influence on report, not a driver of the illusion. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-997) in full with its supplementary figure; worth reading as the case for the rubber hand illusion surviving trait suggestibility, made from Lush et al.’s own open data (n = 353): the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings does not vary with hypnotisability (Bayes factor 5.7 for the null), is significant in every quartile of it including the least suggestible, and is unmoved by explicit instructions about which condition should work. Read it as a reanalysis and an argument, not new data: it treats the asynchronous condition as a valid control, which is exactly what the reply (Lush & Seth 2022) disputes, and its drift analysis is inconclusive by its own Bayes factor. |
| LIT-1267 | Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Lush & Seth (2022), Nat Commun 13:563, replying to Ehrsson et al. (2022). They accept the reanalyses and dispute the reading: an asynchronous condition is no control for demand characteristics, because expectancies are higher for the synchronous condition, and in their sample the expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07). Highly hypnotisable participants may meet those expectancies by generating the experience, less hypnotisable ones by response bias. Agreement with “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand” rose with hypnotisability (b = 0.76, rs = 0.27) and averaged 0.7 on a seven-point scale whose maximum is 3. Whether multisensory integration plays a significant role in RHI measures awaits experiments with adequate controls. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1003) in full; worth reading as the clearest short statement of why a synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference cannot by itself show that the rubber hand illusion is multisensory: participants expect more from the synchronous condition, and in Lush et al.’s sample (n = 353) that expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability, so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict too. It adds that agreement with the ownership item rises steeply with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Read it as a reply: the expectancy and ownership regressions are post hoc, as the authors grant of both sides, and its alternative for low-suggestible participants, response bias, is asserted and not measured. |
| LIT-1268 | No causal link between changes in hand position sense and feeling of limb ownership in the rubber hand illusion | Abdulkarim & Ehrsson (2016; online 2015), Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 78:707–720. During 90 s of synchronous or asynchronous brushing, a motor moved the participant’s hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand at 0.9 mm/s, below the threshold for feeling the movement. Pointing to the hand followed the displacement (drift main effect η² .68 in Experiment 1), but questionnaire ownership depended only on synchrony and did not differ between toward, away or a static hand (n = 18 in each of two experiments). The static condition reproduced the classic synchronous drift and its correlation with the illusion (r = .56). The authors conclude that changing hand position sense does not change ownership, so drift is not a cause of the illusion; whether ownership causes drift is left open. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-992) in full; worth reading as the direct test of whether a change in felt hand position causes the feeling of owning the rubber hand. A motor slid the hidden real hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during stroking, too slowly to notice; pointing moved with it by about 5–6 cm, and questionnaire ownership did not change, in two experiments of 18. The authors conclude that drift is not a prerequisite of the illusion and is a process distinct from ownership, while still defending drift as a measure when the hand is immobile. Read it as a null result from 18 participants with no equivalence test, within distances (8–24 cm) where the illusion is known to work, and with some statistics that do not agree with their own test values. |
| LIT-1272 | Explaining Away the Body: Experiences of Supernaturally Caused Touch and Touch on Non-Hand Objects within the Rubber Hand Illusion | Hohwy & Paton (2010), PLoS ONE 5:e9416. Through a head-mounted display, a foreign arm (an experimenter’s, then a rubber one) was seen aligned with the participant’s own arm while both were tapped. Synchronous tapping, against asynchronous, raised ratings that the felt touch was produced by the seen finger on the seen arm, and the rating held through pauses of up to a minute (n = 13). After onset, synchrony also raised ratings that a finger hovering 5 cm off the rubber arm caused the touch and that touch was felt on a cardboard box (n = 11 and 10); without prior onset the box gave no synchrony difference (n = 9). The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one comparison only. The authors read the results as the visual body image being “explained away” by ongoing multisensory inference, and as support for one-deficit theories of delusion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-998); worth reading as a philosopher’s small rubber hand experiment that pushes the illusion past where it should break, and as the study Apps & Tsakiris cite for cooling of the real hand. Through a head-mounted display the foreign arm was seen exactly where the participant’s own arm lay. Synchronous tapping made people rate the touch as produced on the seen arm (13 people), and after onset they went on to rate touch as caused by a finger hovering 5 cm off a rubber arm, or felt on a cardboard box (10 and 11 people); some described the hovering finger as magnetism, ESP or black magic. Nine people shown the box without prior onset gave no synchrony difference. The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one of four comparisons, by what reads as a one-tailed test. Read it as four small samples, single leading questions with no ownership item, no expectation measure, and a temperature result too weak to carry the claim that the real hand loses ownership. |
| LIT-1273 | Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency | Kalckert & Ehrsson (2012), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6:40. A moving rubber hand illusion: the participant taps a hidden index finger linked by a rod to the finger of a wooden model hand in view. Synchronous movement gave ownership (mean 1.63 on −3 to +3) and agency (2.44), and a 1.73 cm drift toward the model, where a ~500 ms asynchrony gave neither (n = 20 and 20). In a 2 × 2 design (n = 32 each), passive movement abolished agency (−0.61) but left ownership (1.57) and drift, and a model hand rotated 180° abolished ownership (−0.62) and drift but left agency (2.2): a double dissociation on questionnaires. Agency was higher, and correlated with ownership (r = 0.50), only when the hand was owned. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-993) in full; worth reading as the first experiment to set the sense of ownership and the sense of agency against each other in one rubber hand paradigm. A wooden model hand whose index finger is linked by a rod to the participant’s hidden finger is owned when it moves in time with the real finger, whether the movement is the participant’s own or imposed by the experimenter, and is controlled when the participant moves, whether or not it is owned: passive movement removed agency and left ownership, and rotating the model hand 180° removed ownership and left agency. Read it as 104 participants over four between-group experiments, with named non-parametric tests, means and SDs but no standardised effect sizes, a dissociation shown on questionnaires alone (drift measures ownership only), and no control for what participants expected the conditions to do. It also finds the two not independent: agency was rated higher, and correlated with ownership, only when the hand was owned. |
| LIT-1274 v2 | Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(1):7–13. An opinion piece proposing that research on bodily self-consciousness isolate minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), “the conscious experience of being a self”, defined by three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, spatiotemporal self-location, and a weak (geometrical) first-person perspective, claimed jointly necessary and sufficient. The rubber-hand illusion and somatoparaphrenia alter only partial ownership and so do not touch MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and the full-body illusions of Lenggenhager et al. and Ehrsson (2007) do. Agency is causally enabling for MPS but not constitutive of it. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1002) in full; worth reading as the short programmatic paper that names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest form of the experience of being a self, and splits it into three dimensions: self-identification with the body as a whole, self-location, and a weak, purely geometrical first-person perspective. Its distinctive move is to set partial ownership (the rubber-hand illusion, somatoparaphrenia) apart from global ownership, and to say only the second reaches MPS, so that full-body illusions and neurological out-of-body phenomena, not the rubber hand, are the entry point. Its most quotable thesis is that bodily agency “is a causally enabling, but not a constitutive condition, for phenomenal selfhood”. An opinion piece: no new data, the evidence cited, and the necessity and sufficiency claims asserted. |
| LIT-1275 | What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | Longo, Schüür, Kammers, Tsakiris & Haggard (2008), Cognition 107:978–998. 131 participants rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis gave four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, after asynchrony only. A second analysis split embodiment into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location were positive after synchronous brushing and negative after asynchronous; agency was negative after both. Drift toward the rubber hand was 1.34 cm after synchrony and a non-significant 0.30 cm after asynchrony, and ownership and location each predicted it. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1004) in full, from the published article on the first author’s lab site; worth reading as the first large-sample measurement of what the rubber hand illusion feels like, and as the study that split “embodiment” of a rubber hand into ownership, location and agency. 131 people rated 27 statements after 60 s of synchronous and of asynchronous brushing. A principal components analysis found four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, only after asynchronous brushing. Ownership and location rose above neutral only after synchrony, agency stayed below it, and ownership and location each predicted proprioceptive drift. Read it knowing that the three subcomponents come from a second varimax rotation of ten items dominated by one component, that there is no control for expectation or suggestion, and that every item is about a hand, none about the whole body. |
| LIT-1277 v4 | Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | Botvinick & Cohen (1998), Nature 391:756. Ten subjects watched a rubber left hand being brushed in synchrony with their own hidden left hand. After ten minutes they affirmed feeling the touch where they saw the rubber hand touched, that the touch was caused by the brush on the rubber hand, and that the rubber hand was theirs. After a 30-minute exposure, blind reaches toward the real hand were displaced toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion was reported, and an asynchronously brushed control group reported the illusion for 7% of the time against 42% and showed no drift toward it. The authors conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1006) in full; worth reading as the one-page report that founded the rubber hand illusion paradigm: synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand makes touch be felt where the rubber hand is touched and the rubber hand be felt as one’s own, and after 30 minutes the felt position of the real hand drifts toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, while asynchronous brushing abolishes both. Read it as a brief communication: ten subjects, no stated control-group size, statistics given only as P-values, and a connectionist model and a premotor-cell analogy mentioned but not shown. Its closing claim, that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”, is the sentence the later literature on body ownership builds on. |
| LIT-1279 v2 | Video Ergo Sum: Manipulating Bodily Self-Consciousness | Lenggenhager, Tadi, Metzinger & Blanke (2007), Science 317:1096–1099. A whole-body rubber hand illusion in video virtual reality. Participants saw their own back, filmed from 2 m behind, as a body standing in front of them, stroked in or out of time with strokes on their real back. Under synchronous stroking they rated the seen body as theirs and, after blindfolded displacement, returned to a point shifted toward it (24.1 cm in study I, n = 14). In study II (n = 14) a mannequin gave the same, and a non-bodily object a weaker, non-significant drift with no self-identification. Nobody reported disembodiment or a shifted viewpoint. The authors conclude that self-location and the global ownership they tie to selfhood rest partly on the same visuo-tactile integration as body-part ownership, constrained by knowledge of what a body looks like. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-999), with its supporting online material and the 2008 e-letter exchange; worth reading as the first full-body version of the rubber hand illusion and the experiment the self-model theory cites for global body ownership. Two groups of 14 people saw, through a head-mounted display, a video of a body 2 m in front of them being stroked on the back. When the stroking was synchronous with strokes on their own back, they rated the seen body as theirs and, displaced blindfolded, walked back to a spot about 17 to 25 cm toward it. A mannequin worked; a rectangular object weakened the drift and was not felt as one’s body. Nobody reported leaving the body or seeing from elsewhere, so the authors call it heautoscopy-like, not an out-of-body experience. Read it as two small samples with modest, partly inconsistent effects, and with a rival reading (self-recognition in a video system) that its critics raised and its design does not exclude. |
| LIT-1281 | The Rubber Hand Illusion: Feeling of Ownership and Proprioceptive Drift Do Not Go Hand in Hand | Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst (2011), PLoS ONE 6:e21659. Robot arms stroked a rubber hand and the hidden real hand, and felt finger position was probed by a projected dot. Drift toward the rubber hand built up to about 5–6 cm under synchronous stroking, and to the same level when the hand was only seen, unstroked, or when asynchronous stroking was interrupted every 10 s for measurement. Only 120 s of continuous asynchronous stroking held drift near zero (about 1 cm), which reproduces the classic synchronous–asynchronous difference. The questionnaire showed ownership only after synchronous stroking. The authors conclude that drift and ownership come from different integration processes, that asynchrony suppresses drift rather than synchrony causing it, and that drift is not a valid proxy for ownership. Groups were of ten. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1009) in full; worth reading as the study that broke the assumed tie between proprioceptive drift and the feeling of owning the rubber hand. With robot-delivered stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward the rubber hand appeared under synchronous stroking, under no stroking at all (only seeing the hand), and under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s, at levels not significantly different from synchronous stroking (about 5–6 cm); only continuous asynchronous stroking kept it near zero. Ownership, by questionnaire, needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift comes from visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, and that “conclusions about feelings of ownership cannot be drawn from measuring proprioceptive drift alone”. Read it as groups of 10, a visual-judgement measure rather than reaching, and an Experiment 2 whose ownership evidence is anecdotal debriefing, not a questionnaire. |
| LIT-1287 v2 | A Maximum-Likelihood Interpretation for Slow Feature Analysis | Turner & Sahani (Neural Computation 2007). Gives a probabilistic model for which, in a limiting case, inference and learning “yield exactly the results of SFA”, in the way that independent component analysis has a maximum-likelihood reading, and uses the model to motivate several extensions of the algorithm. Not read; this summary is from the abstract. The model’s form and the limit taken are not checked here. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-20, not read. A search on 2026-10-20 for a lawful full text reached none. The DOI resolves to MIT Press (direct.mit.edu, article 7171), which returned a Cloudflare bot check (403); the article is not open access in any case. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it closed, with no repository full text. Europe PMC has it (PMID 17348772) but not in PMC. Sahani’s Gatsby publication pages (~maneesh/papers/ and researchli2.html) list it with a DOI link only, no file. The Cambridge Machine Learning Group’s publications page (mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/publications/) gives the abstract and links Turner’s old Gatsby page (gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~turner/Publications/turner-and-sahani-2007a.html), which returns 404, as do the PDF at the same path and the guessed Cambridge paths (cbl.eng.cam.ac.uk and learning.eng.cam.ac.uk under /Public/Turner/, mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/pdf/TurSah07.pdf and variants). OpenAlex lists two repository records with no full text flagged: UCL Discovery (eprint 134626), which returned a Cloudflare bot check (403), and publications.eng.cam.ac.uk/526467, whose host no longer resolves. CiteSeerX (10.1.1.109.4162) reset the connection on four tries and returned 503 once, so whether it holds a cached author copy is unknown. The Wayback Machine reset the connection or returned 429, and the fetch tool cannot reach it. Semantic Scholar returned 429. Title searches found no author-posted copy. So this is a failure on access as much as on availability: a cached copy may exist at CiteSeerX or in the Wayback Machine’s capture of Turner’s Gatsby page. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1344 v2 | Neurophenomenal structuralism. A philosophical agenda for a structuralist neuroscience of consciousness | Lyre (2022), Neuroscience of Consciousness niac012. A programmatic paper. Only relational properties cross the neural/non-neural boundary, and spatiotemporal relations, by acquaintance, answer the Newman problem for the brain. Two assumptions: any phenomenal experience is fully individuated, in its specificity, by its place in a quality space (Q-structure); and Q-structure is mirrored by a surjective homomorphism from neural feature maps. With metaphysically necessary supervenience assumed, it argues for reductive physicalism, an instrumentalist structural representationalism, holism about experience (dichromats experience every colour differently) and the actual and nomological impossibility of spectrum inversion. It concerns specific, not generic, consciousness, and denies being a structural realism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1060) from the version of record deposited in PubMed Central (PMC9396309, JATS full text via Europe PMC; the OUP PDF returned 403); worth reading as the most explicit statement of phenomenal structuralism as an ontology: each specific phenomenal character is fully individuated by its place in a quality space, that space is mirrored by a surjective homomorphism from neural feature maps, and holism and the impossibility of nomological spectrum inversion follow. It is the statement Negro and Aldé quote as their target. It is programmatic: nothing is tested, the neural half rests on one cited V4 study, it addresses only which experience a conscious state is and not whether it is conscious, and its reduction rests on metaphysically necessary supervenience that the author says he cannot argue for. |
| LIT-1349 v2 | Report-modulated prefrontal activity and consistent posterior representations during conscious visual perception | He, Zhang, Wang, Meng, Jiang, Xu, Wu, Sheng, Ye & Ding (2026). With report and no-report visual masking and MEG, posterior sensory regions encoded stimulus presence and category whether or not report was required, with stronger alpha-band recurrent coupling for visible stimuli, while prefrontal activity and fronto-posterior connectivity appeared only under report. The authors read this as favouring posterior accounts of phenomenal consciousness. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-22, no lawful full text reached; it failed on availability. The article is a subscription article in Consciousness and Cognition: Unpaywall reports it closed with no open-access location, OpenAlex lists only the publisher and PubMed, Europe PMC marks it “Subscription required” and it is not in PMC, and Semantic Scholar has no open PDF. No preprint was found on searching Europe PMC’s preprint index and OSF preprints by title, or Semantic Scholar by title. The publisher’s page (ScienceDirect, PII S1053810026000838) returned 403 to this client. Only the PubMed abstract was read, and the summary agrees with it. No NOTE is filed. A copy from the owner, or from one of the two authors whose addresses PubMed gives (Zheng Ye, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Xiaobin Ding, Northwest Normal University), would return it to reading. |
| LIT-1353 v2 | The Theory of Constructed Emotion: More Than a Feeling | Barrett et al. (2025). A reply to van Heijst et al., who proposed that basic emotion theory explains emotions as bodily states and the theory of constructed emotion explains the feelings that arise from them. The authors argue that this split misrepresents constructed emotion through three simplifications, and that the two theories rest on incommensurate assumptions and cannot be reconciled. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1067) from the publisher’s text in PubMed Central (PMC12164598, CC BY-NC 4.0); worth reading as the theory’s architects saying plainly that feeling is not a second phenomenon that represents the body’s regulation: the same allostatic signals that regulate the body make feeling, an instance of emotion is one whole-brain event, and splitting it into an objective bodily state and a subjective feeling is a premise of basic emotion theory, which they call incommensurable with theirs. It is a reply with no data; its evidence is cited lists, much of it from the authors’ own groups, and basic emotion theory is described by its opponents. It does not discuss emotion regulation, reappraisal or therapy. |
| LIT-1354 v2 | Distilling the Neurophenomenological Signatures of Pure Awareness during Transcendental Meditation | Chandia-Jorquera, van Mil, Estarellas, Dauphin, Pascovich & Canales-Johnson (2026). EEG with retrospective temporal experience tracing in 33 experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioners and 33 sex- and age-matched controls who counted. Practitioners traced higher and more variable “pure awareness” (d = 0.77 and 1.32). A random-forest classifier on distributed EEG patterns separated meditation from counting at 65% balanced accuracy, led by permutation entropy and aperiodic activity, and meditation from rest at 88% sensitivity, led by low-frequency phase coherence. No robust association between the reports and the EEG was found. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1058) from the bioRxiv preprint, version 3; worth reading as the largest EEG study of Transcendental Meditation with time-resolved reports: 33 practitioners traced more, and more variable, “pure awareness” than 33 matched controls who counted, and a classifier on distributed EEG patterns separated meditation from counting (65% balanced accuracy, on entropy and aperiodic activity) and from rest (88% sensitivity, on low-frequency phase coherence). Its main limit is that the reports were not shown to track any EEG feature. The reports are retrospective ratings on a scale whose top the experimenters defined as “free from content”, demand is conceded only for controls, and the study was funded by, and recruited through, the TM organisation. Evidence about a practice period and about reports, not a neural signature of experience with little content. |
| LIT-1357 v2 | Convergent transcriptomic and connectomic controllers of information integration and its anaesthetic breakdown across mammalian brains | Luppi et al. (2026), Nature Human Behaviour 10(4):777–802. Revised integrated information ΦR, computed pairwise from resting-state fMRI by integrated information decomposition and averaged over region pairs, falls under anaesthesia in humans (sevoflurane, n = 15), macaques, marmosets and mice, with medetomidine–isoflurane in the mouse the exception in the main analysis. It returns on spontaneous recovery in humans, and when central thalamic stimulation restores arousal in two propofol-anaesthetized macaques. Network control energy rises under anaesthesia and correlates negatively with ΦR. Regional ΦR loss is largest in unimodal cortex and follows cortical PVALB expression in human, macaque and mouse. Species-specific mean-field models reproduce the PVALB effect and the advantage of central over ventrolateral thalamic stimulation. The target is behavioural responsiveness. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1064) from the publisher’s open-access version of record (CC BY 4.0); worth reading as the cross-species, causal extension of the same group’s synergistic-workspace result (LIT-949): pairwise integrated information ΦR from resting fMRI falls under anaesthesia in humans, macaques, marmosets and mice and returns with responsiveness, including when central thalamic stimulation re-awakens two anaesthetized macaques, and it tracks arousal better than the original Φ, causal density or functional connectivity. Its main limit is the target: behavioural responsiveness, which the authors call “presumably consciousness” and an “imperfect marker”. It is also pairwise, linear-Gaussian, at rest and content-free, and the causal arm rests on two animals. The PVALB and modelling results are correlational and model-bound. Filed as THEORY-881. |
| LIT-1359 v2 | A systems identification approach using Bayes factors to deconstruct the brain bases of emotion regulation | Bo, Kraynak, Kwon, Sun, Gianaros & Wager (2024). Across two fMRI studies (n = 182 and 176), Bayes factors identify four reappraisal-related systems: an anterior prefrontal one selective for reappraisal, a fronto-parietal-insular one engaged by reappraisal and emotion generation alike, a largely subcortical one (amygdala, hypothalamus, periaqueductal gray) active in negative emotion but unaffected by reappraisal, and a posterior cortical one downregulated by it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1061) from the bioRxiv preprint, version 2 (10 May 2023), not the closed version of record; worth reading as the first imaging study of reappraisal large enough (n = 182 and 176, replicated in both) to give evidence for nulls, which lets it say which regions are engaged only by regulating, which are shared with generating negative emotion, and which emotion-responsive regions reappraisal leaves unchanged. Most of the reappraisal network is shared with generation, a smaller anterior prefrontal and temporo-parietal set is selective for it, and every subcortical emotion-responsive region, amygdala and PAG included, was unchanged while reported negative affect fell. One instructed strategy, one picture task, BOLD means and one rating per trial; its talk of “subcortical-level affective experience” goes beyond what was measured. |
| LIT-1362 v2 | Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) | Carruthers & Gennaro (2001; rev. 2026), SEP. Most kinds of mental state also occur unconsciously (blindsight, absent-minded driving, the agnosic D.F.), and higher-order theories say a state is phenomenally conscious when it is, or is disposed to be, the object of a suitable non-inferential higher-order representation. The entry sets out inner sense, actualist higher-order thought (Rosenthal), dispositionalist dual-content theory (Carruthers) and self-representational and hybrid views (Kriegel, Gennaro, Van Gulick, Picciuto). It gives the objections (targetless representations, the rock, animals and infants, sufficiency, depersonalization) and the evidence and counter-evidence that prefrontal cortex realizes the higher-order states, and concludes no verdict. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1066) from the live entry, substantive revision of 9 January 2026; worth reading as the map of higher-order theories, which explain what makes a mental state conscious rather than unconscious by a higher-order representation of it: inner sense, actualist and dispositionalist higher-order thought, self-representational and hybrid views, the standing objections (targetless states, the rock, animals and infants, sufficiency) and the prefrontal evidence. Read it knowing that it argues for no verdict, that it is maintained by Gennaro, a higher-order theorist, while Carruthers and Lycan are reported to have given up their versions, and that its empirical section reports results to about 2023 and not the 2025 adversarial-collaboration findings. |
| LIT-1363 v2 | A beautiful loop: An active inference theory of consciousness | Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria (2025). Active inference can model consciousness under three conditions: a simulated world model (an epistemic field), inferential competition to enter it (Bayesian binding), and epistemic depth, the recurrent sharing of beliefs by which the world model contains the knowledge that it exists. A hyper-model for precision control is proposed to implement them, and the account is applied to altered states and meditation. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1063) from the PsyArXiv preprint, version 3 (June 2025); worth reading as the most explicit proposal that what makes inference conscious is recursion over precision: a unified world model, a coherence-driven competition to enter it, and epistemic depth, the model looped back through the hierarchy by a hyper-model that predicts precision at every level, with awareness graded by that depth and not by content. It is the record’s best-stated recursive candidate for QUESTION-254. Its main limit is that it is conceptual: no data, no simulation, a formal part (Table 1) that is a standard hierarchy with layer-wise precision hyper-parameters, and a definition of epistemic depth in terms of awareness. A footnote withdraws the claim that meeting the conditions guarantees phenomenal experience. |
| LIT-1364 v2 | On the minimal theory of consciousness implicit in active inference | Whyte, Corcoran, Robinson, Smith, Moran, Parr, Friston, Seth & Hohwy (2026). Reviewing active inference models of consciousness, it argues that they share a small set of theoretical commitments, which together amount to a minimal and testable theory of consciousness; since all the models minimise the same objective, decomposable into interpretable terms, it can compare phenomena that separate theories treat apart. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1062) from arXiv:2410.06633v2, the submitted version; worth reading as the clearest statement of the theory of consciousness that active inference models already assume: conscious contents are posterior beliefs about world, body or brain, and a posterior is conscious when it has the capacity to inform discrete, counterfactual policy selection, slowly and precisely enough. It also reviews the simulations of rivalry, access, no-report, interoception, valence and meta-awareness, and names two predictions close to its core. Its main limit is scope: the criterion is one of conscious access, read off models built to report, and the authors hold it only for humans and similar animals. A review with three small simulations of its own; neither prediction is tested. |
| LIT-1368 v2 | Prominent and persistent loss of past awareness in amnesia: Delusion, impaired consciousness or coping strategy? | Wilson, Kopelman and Kapur (2008). On Clive Wearing’s repeated claims, in his diary and in speech, that he has just become conscious for the first time, and his denial of earlier awareness when shown evidence of it; the paper weighs whether this is delusion, impaired consciousness or a coping strategy. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability, as far as could be told. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text. OpenAlex lists two repository records: King’s College London’s Pure page (abstract only, no file) and the University of Southampton’s ePrints record 55417, which could not be opened past its bot check, so whether it holds a file is unknown. The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit record has no file. The abstract, read from the King’s College record, confirms the summary. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1369 v2 | Dense amnesia in a professional musician following herpes simplex virus encephalitis | Wilson, Baddeley and Kapur (1995). The case study of the musician Clive Wearing after herpes simplex encephalitis in 1985: very dense anterograde amnesia and extensive retrograde amnesia, with musical performance (playing, sight-reading, conducting) largely preserved. | Unavailable — no lawful copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. The article is closed: Unpaywall and OpenAlex report no open copy and no repository full text, Taylor & Francis offers it only behind a paywall, PubMed (8557808) has the abstract only, the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit bibliography lists it without a file, and a web search found no author’s or institutional copy. The abstract, read from PubMed, confirms the dense amnesia but does not mention preserved musical skill, and says the patient’s belief that he has just woken “appears to be the result of a delusion rather than the consequence of his amnesia”. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-22, “Graph Learning Applications”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1382 v2 | Event perception: A mind-brain perspective | Zacks et al. (2007). Event segmentation theory: perceptual systems continuously predict what will happen next, a transient rise in prediction error is perceived as an event boundary, and boundaries update the event models that guide attention and memory. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1084) from the author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC2852534, NIH public access); worth holding as the statement of event segmentation theory: transient rises in perceptual prediction error are perceived as event boundaries and reset working-memory event models, a domain-general mechanism of attention and memory control. A review with mostly correlational evidence; prediction error is not measured in people and the predicted anterior cingulate response at boundaries was not found. A theory of a passive observer of others’ activity; it does not mention doorways or one’s own intentions. |
| LIT-1438 v2 | The current status of research on the structure of evaluative space | Norris, Gollan, Berntson & Cacioppo (2010), Biological Psychology 84(3):422–436. A review of the evaluative space model. The affect system has separable positive and negative channels whose joint output is a bipolar predisposition to approach or avoid. They can be activated reciprocally, independently or together. Coactivation, simultaneous or by fast oscillation, is ambivalence, rare and arousing. Asymmetric activation functions give a negativity bias and a positivity offset, and recalibrate with context. Levels of the neuraxis can override one another. Clinical implications for depression and anxiety. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1101): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC2894997, NIHMS165251). Worth reading as the evaluative space model’s own later summary, written with Berntson and Cacioppo. Positivity and negativity are separable systems, whose combined output is a bipolar predisposition to approach or withdraw. They can be activated reciprocally, independently or together, and coactivation is ambivalence. Ambivalence and neutrality give the same middling output from different underlying states. Negativity has the higher gain and positivity the higher intercept. It stands in for the unread 1994 and 1997 papers (LIT-1453, LIT-1456). |
| LIT-1444 | Brain networks subserving functional core processes of emotions identified with componential modeling | Mohammadi, Van De Ville & Vuilleumier (2023), Cerebral Cortex 33:7993–8010. Twenty participants watched 40 film clips during fMRI and rated 119 salient events (12 s each) on 32 CoreGRID features, and heart and respiration rate were recorded. Partial least squares correlation between event-wise brain maps and feature ratings yields six latent variables, the “functional core processes”: valuation (wanting-like), novelty, hedonic impact (liking-like), goal monitoring, caring for others (“being moved”) and approach/avoidance. No arousal process emerges, and the processes mix components rather than mapping one to one. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1107): in full, from the published version (CC BY 4.0) in the Archive ouverte UNIGE (unige:170302). Worth reading as the first attempt to recover the component process model’s components from brain and behaviour together. Twenty participants watched 40 film clips during fMRI and then rated 119 salient 12-second events on 32 CoreGRID features. Heart and respiration rate were recorded. Partial least squares correlation found six brain–behaviour latent variables, read as valuation, novelty, hedonic impact, goal monitoring, caring for others and approach/avoidance. For the record, the result is two distinct valence-like networks: a “wanting”-like valuation process and a “liking”-like hedonic one. Each event gets a feature vector, but no within-episode synchronization is computed. |
| LIT-1452 | Conscious emotional experience emerges as a function of multilevel, appraisal-driven response synchronization | Grandjean, Sander & Scherer (2008), Consciousness and Cognition 17(2):484–495. Componential appraisal models explain feelings better than basic-emotion or dimensional models. Appraisal runs in parallel at sensory-motor, schematic and conceptual levels and stops at the first conclusive result. Consciousness of an emotion emerges when lower levels cannot cope, especially when component synchronization reaches a critical level and duration, so that conscious, representational regulation is required. Conscious feeling needs, besides component synchronization, local and distant neuronal synchronization that integrates the components’ representations. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1115): in full, from the copy the authors’ laboratory (the Geneva E3 Lab) posts on its publications page. Worth reading as the component process model’s fullest account of when emotion becomes conscious. Appraisal runs in parallel at several levels and stops when a lower level reaches a conclusive result. Consciousness is recruited when it does not: when component synchronization reaches a critical level and duration that cannot be regulated automatically, so that higher-level regulation, which needs explicit representations, must take over. The feeling is a central representation built by neuronal synchronization, local and distant. Its measures are EEG gamma and beta activity in felt versus unfelt episodes, and phase coherence between brain regions. It partly rivals and partly supports the record’s self-model condition for felt valence (CLAIM-439). |
| LIT-1455 | Bridging emotion theory and neurobiology through dynamic systems modeling | Lewis (2005), Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28(2):169–194, with open peer commentary. Appraisal and emotion are not cause and effect but constituents that organize one another, through positive and negative feedback and circular causality, into an emotion–appraisal amalgam, an “emotional interpretation”. Trigger, self-amplification and self-stabilization phases. Interpretations are attractors, one converging at a time, with abrupt phase transitions between them. Their neural basis is nested corticolimbic loops, neuromodulation, vertical integration, action monitoring and theta-band synchrony, and stable states drive learning on a developmental timescale. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1119): the target article in part, from the BBS treatment posted on the University of Geneva E3 Lab’s publications page with Sander and Scherer’s commentary. Worth reading as the fullest dynamic-systems account of appraisal and emotion. Appraisal and emotion constituents organize each other into one “emotional interpretation” through bidirectional feedback, in trigger, self-amplification and self-stabilization phases. Emotional interpretations are attractors, one at a time, and switch by phase transition. Vertical integration gives them momentum and selects among them. Stable states drive learning across a slower timescale. It contains the dynamics of one organization coming to prevail, but what prevails is an interpretation, not an ordering of the system’s own states. |
| LIT-1459 | Pleasure systems in the brain | Berridge & Kringelbach (2015), Neuron 86(3):646–664. Reward is three separable components: ‘liking’ (hedonic impact), ‘wanting’ (incentive salience) and learning. ‘Liking’ can be measured without report, by orofacial taste reactivity, which is homologous from rats to human infants. It is generated by cubic-millimetre opioid and endocannabinoid hotspots in nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum and perhaps cortex and pons. Mesolimbic dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’. Incentive sensitization makes an addict want a drug that has become less pleasant. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without any felt pleasure. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1110): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC4425246, NIHMS664561). A review of the affective neuroscience of pleasure. Reward splits into ‘liking’ (hedonic impact), ‘wanting’ (incentive salience) and learning, with separable mechanisms. ‘Liking’ is measured without report by taste reactivity, which is homologous across rats, apes and newborn humans. It is generated by small opioid and endocannabinoid hotspots. Mesolimbic dopamine and most “pleasure electrodes” raise ‘wanting’ without raising ‘liking’. Objective ‘liking’ can occur without felt pleasure. Filed for the record’s account of valence as potential (CLAIM-440), which wanting-without-liking puts under pressure. |
| LIT-1461 | Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction | Berridge & Robinson (2016), American Psychologist 71(8):670–679. ‘Wanting’ (incentive salience, mesolimbic and dopamine-related) and ‘liking’ (hedonic impact, small opioid and endocannabinoid hotspots) are dissociable. Repeated, especially intermittent high-dose, drug use can sensitize the ‘wanting’ system, making it hyper-reactive to drug cues and contexts, lastingly and perhaps permanently, while ‘liking’ need not rise and may fall. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose cognitive desire, run without report, and grow during abstinence. Its scope is said to extend, on emerging evidence, to behavioural addictions and to the compulsions of dopamine dysregulation syndrome. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1109): in full, from the NIH author manuscript in PubMed Central (PMC5171207, NIHMS816820). Worth reading as the authors’ own short statement, a quarter-century on, of the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. Drugs, and perhaps unpredictable non-drug rewards, can make mesolimbic ‘wanting’ systems lastingly hyper-reactive to cues and contexts, and ‘liking’ need not rise with it. Sensitized ‘wanting’ can oppose a person’s cognitive desire, operate without report, persist for years and grow during abstinence. It is a review of the authors’ programme. Filed for the record’s question whether potential of a proxy for maintenance is valence, and the form addiction and metric fixation share (QUESTION-267), to which it gives a mechanism on the personal side. |
| LIT-1471 | An Appraisal-Driven Componential Approach to the Emotional Brain | Sander, Grandjean & Scherer (2018), Emotion Review 10:219–231. A perspective article. Major emotion theories agree that emotion has five components, so the emotional brain should be studied as five functionally defined networks: elicitation (appraisal), expression, autonomic reaction, action tendency and feeling. Appraisal drives the changes and the synchronization in the other four. Synchronization is proposed to be neuronal phase or cross-frequency coupling within and between components, and feeling to emerge when it passes a threshold. No measure is given and no data are reported. | Active — read 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1103): in full, from the published version deposited in the Archive ouverte UNIGE (unige:109591). Worth reading as the Geneva group’s programme statement for taking the component process model into the brain. It splits the emotional brain into five functionally defined networks (elicitation, expression, autonomic reaction, action tendency, feeling). It proposes that component synchronization is neuronal phase or cross-frequency synchronization, within and between components, and repeats Scherer’s hypothesis that feeling arises when the degree of synchronization passes a threshold. It names control precedence as priority among action tendencies. It gives no measure of synchronization and reports no data of its own. |
| LIT-1476 v3 | Active inference and learning | Friston, FitzGerald, Rigoli, Schwartenbeck, O’Doherty & Pezzulo (2016). An active inference account of choice and learning, on how goal-directed and habitual behaviour contextualise each other. Habits emerge naturally from sequential policy optimisation in agents equipped with state-action policies, as learned prior beliefs over policies; epistemic, ambiguity-resolving behaviour enables pragmatic behaviour and then habit. The important distinction is between belief-free and belief-based schemes, not model-free and model-based; the scheme covers dopamine transfer, reversal learning, habit formation and devaluation, and reduces to a Bellman scheme without ambiguity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1138) from the CC BY version of record; worth reading as the active inference account in which a habit is one more policy, its transitions and prior probability learned by counting the agent’s own behaviour, so that habits form from goal-directed choice and, once formed, survive devaluation. It gives the record a published analogue of a learned log prior beside a precision-weighted evaluation. Simulation of one T-maze task only; its learned prior grows by frequency, not by reward, its reaction times are simulation run times, and the authors concede that it makes probably no new behavioural predictions. |
| LIT-1494 v3 | Eligibility Traces and Plasticity on Behavioral Time Scales: Experimental Support of NeoHebbian Three-Factor Learning Rules | Gerstner, Lehmann, Liakoni, Corneil & Brea (2018). Behaviour unfolds over seconds and spikes over milliseconds, so learning rules must bridge the two. In neoHebbian three-factor rules, co-activation of pre- and postsynaptic neurons sets an eligibility trace at the synapse, which changes the weight only if a third factor (reward, punishment, surprise or novelty, carried by neuromodulators or special inputs) arrives while it is set. The review sets out four recent experiments supporting eligibility traces on the scale of seconds. | Active — read in full 2026-10-24 (NOTE-1130) from the CC BY version of record; worth reading as the review that set out what the first direct experiments (2014–2017) showed about eligibility traces on the scale of seconds: in striatum about 1 s, in cortex 3–10 s with the modulator setting the sign, in hippocampus about 2 s. Mostly slices, one laboratory per region, by theoreticians whose models assumed the traces; they grant that other mechanisms could bridge the same gap, and what is well established is the hour-scale tag of consolidation. |
| LIT-1680 | Retention of Memory through Metamorphosis: Can a Moth Remember What It Learned As a Caterpillar? | Blackiston, Silva Casey & Weiss (2008). Tobacco hornworm caterpillars (Manduca sexta) trained by pairing ethyl acetate with mild shock avoided the odour (78% of 41 fifth instars). Moths that had been trained as fifth instars still avoided it, four to five weeks and a metamorphosis later (77% of 27), and 80% of the tracked moths made the choice they had made as larvae. Odour alone, shock alone and backward pairing had no effect. Caterpillars trained at third instar kept the aversion through two larval molts but lost it as moths. Washing the pupae of trained larvae did not remove the adult aversion, and putting the odour on naive pupae did not create one, so chemical residue on the pupal case does not explain it. The authors suggest, by analogy with Drosophila, that the memory survives in mushroom-body neurons that form late in larval life and keep their projections through metamorphosis; they did not examine the brain. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1249) from the publisher’s PDF (PLoS ONE, CC BY), checked against Europe PMC’s XML (PMC2248710); worth reading as the clean modern demonstration that a single conditioned aversion survives insect metamorphosis, with contamination controls and a timing dissociation that points to surviving neurons as the carrier; one odour, one lab and adult groups of 15 to 31. |
| LIT-1707 | The stability of memories during brain remodeling: A perspective | Blackiston, Shomrat & Levin (2015). A perspective gathering three animal systems in which learned behaviour is reported to survive drastic remodelling of the brain: metamorphosing insects, where odour-shock aversions learned by fly and moth larvae persist in adults; planaria, where McConnell’s 1960s work and the authors’ automated replication report memory surviving head regeneration; and hibernating ground squirrels and marmots, whose hippocampal dendrites are pruned in torpor and regrow on arousal. The authors argue that synaptic plasticity alone cannot explain lifelong memory, propose a “blueprint” kept by another mechanism, and suggest that in planaria memory may be stored outside the brain, possibly in neoblasts or in non-neural bioelectric networks, and imprinted on the regenerating brain. They set out a research programme to test it. No new data. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1258) from Europe PMC’s full-text XML (PMC4802789, CC BY-NC), cited by section; worth reading as the Levin lab’s map of the cases and its hypothesis that memory can live outside the brain; a programme, not evidence, which restates its own planarian result in one sentence. |
| LIT-1732 | An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planaria and its persistence through head regeneration | Shomrat & Levin (2013). With an automated training apparatus, planarian flatworms familiarized with a textured environment fed sooner in it. Worms whose heads were cut off regenerated new heads and, after a brief reminder session, showed the familiarity effect: a memory that outlasts the brain that formed it, perhaps stored elsewhere in the body. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher; it is not in PMC. The publisher’s pages answered with a Cloudflare challenge, so whether the journal has since opened the article could not be checked, and the Levin lab’s publications page links only to the publisher. A copy on a course page was not used. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Levin and Shomrat’s 2013 post on The Node (LIT-1776). |
| LIT-1734 | Mental Hoop Diaries: Emotional Memories of a College Basketball Game in Rival Fans | Botzung et al. (2010). Twenty-three male Duke and UNC fans watched an archived 2001 Duke–UNC game three times in the lab, then under fMRI recalled whether each of 64 shots went in. The same shot was positive for one side and negative for the other, so valence was set by allegiance with the stimulus held fixed. Shots good for one’s own team were recalled more accurately and confidently and rated more intense. Emotional intensity, not valence, modulated amygdala, hippocampus, striatum and cortical midline regions; positive shots added dorsal fronto-parietal and sensorimotor activity. Fan groups did not differ in accuracy or intensity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1313) from the NIH author manuscript (NIHMS176990, PMC3319676) from the PMC Cloud open-data service, cited by section; worth reading as the one study the record holds in which a fan’s allegiance alone decides whether the same remembered play is good or bad, and in which fans remember their own side’s successes better; it says nothing about how a rivalry’s history is handed on. |
| LIT-1738 | Molecular insights into transgenerational non-genetic inheritance of acquired behaviours | Bohacek & Mansuy (2015). Reviews rodent evidence that acquired behaviours and stress responses are transmitted through the germline, by sperm RNAs, DNA methylation and chromatin, and what remains open in humans. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. The ETH Research Collection and the Zurich repository (ZORA) list it without a file, as they do Mansuy’s other reviews of 2013–2017. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). Read in its place, and not a substitute for reading it: Jawaid and Mansuy 2019 (LIT-1774). |
| LIT-1746 | Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations | Dias & Ressler (2014). Male mice fear-conditioned to acetophenone or propanol before mating sired offspring (F1) and grand-offspring (F2) with heightened startle to, and lower detection thresholds for, the odour their F0 father was conditioned to, and not the other one. The offspring of acetophenone-trained males also had more M71 (Olfr151-expressing) olfactory neurons and larger M71 glomeruli; the anatomy, but not behaviour, was also tested and replicated in offspring conceived by IVF and carried by surrogates. Conditioning mothers before mating gave the same behavioural and anatomical effects, which survived cross-fostering. Olfr151 was less methylated in the sperm of conditioned F0 males (n = 12 vs 10) and of their naive F1 sons (n = 4 vs 4), but not in F1 or F2 olfactory epithelium. The authors read the effect as inherited sensitivity to a salient cue, not inherited fear, and leave open how an odour reaches sperm. | Active — read in full 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1281) from the authors’ accepted manuscript (PMC3923835), served by NCBI’s PMC OAI-PMH service; worth reading as the standard animal case for germline transmission of a parent’s experience: a specific, double-dissociated effect with IVF and cross-fostering controls, small groups, and a methylation result that is modest, confined to sperm and of unclear unit of analysis. This NOTE does not assess the later critique of the paper. |
| LIT-1776 | Remembrance of Brains Past | A blog post by the authors of Shomrat and Levin 2013 announcing its result. Planarians trained to a chamber with a rough, laser-etched floor later recognised it, measured by their readiness to eat a piece of liver there rather than explore as naive worms do, and did so again after their heads were cut off and regrown, provided they had “a brief refresher” first. The training used an automated device that gives individual reward and punishment to 12 worms at a time, around the clock, scored by computer, built to answer the doubts about McConnell’s hand-run 1960s experiments. The authors conclude that memories “can be stored somewhere outside of the brain” and “imprinted on a naïve regenerated brain”, and suggest non-neural cells linked by gap junctions as the store. No numbers, methods or controls are given. | Active — skimmed 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1283), in place of LIT-1732, which could not be reached; worth reading as the authors’ own plain statement of the planarian result and of how they read it, including the reminder it needed; too thin to stand for the paper’s data. |
| LIT-1781 | Retention of Learning through Metamorphosis in the Grain Beetle (Tenebrio molitor) | Alloway (1972). Mealworm larvae trained in a maze were reported to relearn it faster as adult beetles, and the paper reviews earlier claims of retention through insect metamorphosis and the difficulty of separating memory from carried-over chemical cues. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-29; reading attempted the same day, no lawful copy reached. Unpaywall lists no open copy and a web search found none posted by an author, their institution or the publisher. One index marks it open access, but Oxford Academic answered with a Cloudflare challenge, so that could not be checked. No NOTE is filed. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied (ADR-041). |
| LIT-1835 | Binding and Consciousness | Revonsuo & Newman (1999), Consciousness and Cognition 8, 123–127. The editors’ introduction to the journal’s special issue on binding and consciousness, in which Revonsuo’s “Binding and the Phenomenal Unity of Consciousness” (LIT-1208) and Engel et al.’s temporal-binding paper appear. Not read: whether it states a functional/phenomenal distinction is the open question it is filed for. | Unfetched — registered 2026-10-29, not read. A lawful free copy is located at an exact address: the Santa Fe Institute wiki, https://wiki.santafe.edu/images/8/8d/Revonsuo_and_Newman_1999_-_Binding_and_Consciousness.pdf, a scholarly third-party copy of the kind the owner’s ruling of 2026-10-29 counts. On 2026-10-29 the connection to that host was reset for curl (three attempts, and for the wiki’s root page too) and WebFetch got a 503, as on the earlier attempt recorded in NOTE-1406’s history. The failure is on access, not availability. OpenAlex reports the work closed with no repository copy; the publisher’s page (Academic Press, now Elsevier) is paid. A browser fetch of the wiki copy is the cheapest way to read it. It stays Unfetched until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-1946 | Minimal phenomenal experience: Meditation, tonic alertness, and the phenomenology of “pure” consciousness | Metzinger (2020), Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1(I):7. Proposes minimal phenomenal experience (MPE) as a candidate for the simplest consciousness and the entry point to a “minimal model” explanation. MPE is to lack minimal phenomenal selfhood, time and a spatial frame. Six constraints are drawn from contemplative and Western texts: Wakefulness, Low Complexity, Self-Luminosity, Introspective Availability, Epistemicity and Transparency/Opacity. Sixteen case studies flesh them out. The hypothesis: pure awareness is a temporally thin Bayesian representation of the organism’s tonic alertness, a model of an “unpartitioned epistemic space”. It “definitely has representational content” and is “non-egoic self-modelling”. Tonic alertness without that model, as in unresponsive wakefulness, is not conscious. A conceptual paper. Its evidence is quoted report. | Active — read in full 2026-11-01 (NOTE-1498) from the journal’s open-access PDF. Worth reading as the founding statement of minimal phenomenal experience, the concept the record’s reading of Chandia-Jorquera et al. (LIT-1354) takes as given. It holds that pure awareness has representational content: a temporally thin, nonegoic model of the organism’s tonic alertness, its “epistemic space”. On that account, consciousness without a self-model in the egoic sense still involves self-modelling, and it lacks even a phenomenal quality of oneness. Its evidence is sixteen quoted reports and texts. Its methodological problems, performative self-contradiction among them, are deferred to other papers. |
| LIT-1953 v3 | Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons | Anastassiou, Perin, Markram & Koch (2011), Nature Neuroscience 14: 217–223. In rat cortical slices with synaptic transmission blocked, a 12-pipette setup applied and measured LFP-like extracellular fields at layer 5 pyramidal somata. Fields of 0.7–6 mV/mm induced membrane oscillations under 0.5 mV, undiminished to 100 Hz. With spiking driven by current injection, the fields left spike counts unchanged but shifted spike timing: phase locking was significant at 1 Hz from 0.74 mV/mm, at 8 Hz, and at 30 Hz only for the largest field. Up to four nearby neurons were synchronized by a common field. The authors explain the effect by Kirchhoff’s circuit laws and a threshold model. | Active — read 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1516), main text, online methods and references, from the scan of the published article on gwern.net, at the owner’s direction; the supplementary material was not read. Worth reading as the measurement of how large, and how small, ephaptic effects are at physiological field strengths: fields like the LFP’s shift spike timing and synchronize nearby neurons without changing spike counts. It explains them by Kirchhoff’s laws, so it is not evidence against micro-level description. |
| LIT-1963 | Attention as the Source of a Free Will | Jennings (2026), forthcoming in Synthese. Attention is prioritization of mental processing by a subject, and the subject is a collection of fixed, formed and fluid interests with the power to constrain those interests. That power is contextually emergent: the collection’s parts are necessary but not sufficient, and a boundary from its context, the skull, meninges and brain stem, is what lets macro-level patterns constrain micro-level ones. Phase-amplitude coupling is offered as its signature and ephaptic coupling as evidence against weak emergence. Attention breaks stalemates between equally weighted interests and so forms new interests, which the paper offers in place of Kane’s indeterminism as the source of a free will, placing itself “in between libertarianism and compatibilism”. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1508), from the manuscript of 2026-10-29 the owner supplied; worth reading as a worked attempt to make attention the mechanism of a will without a homunculus, and for its one original move, a boundary between an emergent phenomenon and its context as what keeps contextual emergence from collapsing into supervenience. Read it knowing that its neural evidence (phase-amplitude coupling, ephaptic coupling) is consistent with the weakly emergent models it rejects, and that its step from a non-reducible subject to free will is asserted. |
| LIT-1976 v2 | Where do our preferences come from? How hard decisions shape our preferences | Voigt (2022), Front. Behav. Neurosci. 16: 956307, an Opinion article. When two items are liked equally, the value differential computed in vmPFC is too small to choose and dACC registers conflict. A tentative model holds that the tie is broken during the choice by fixation: precuneus allocates spatial attention bottom-up to the salient item, dlPFC holds it in working memory, and the fixated item gains value, so the choice becomes easy. The change lasts only for remembered choices, with hippocampus. The support is mainly the author’s 2019 study, in which fixation duration and dlPFC and precuneus activity predicted later preference change; it is correlational. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1517), from the publisher’s open-access PDF; worth reading as a short statement of the view that preferences form during hard choices, through fixation, rather than only after them through dissonance reduction. It is an Opinion article with a tentative model resting mainly on the author’s 2019 study, and its attentional step is bottom-up capture by salience. |
| LIT-1982 v2 | Dynamic Changes in Phase-Amplitude Coupling Facilitate Spatial Attention Control in Fronto-Parietal Cortex | Szczepanski et al. (2014), PLoS Biology 12(8): e1001936. Electrocorticography in eight epilepsy patients holding covert spatial attention. Broadband high-gamma (80–250 Hz) amplitude was coupled to the phase of an endogenous 2–5 Hz rhythm in 123 of 273 responsive electrodes, more strongly for the contralateral field in 55, robust to removing the evoked-potential window. In 28 electrodes, stronger coupling on a trial went with faster detection (e.g. r(41) = −0.51), for contralateral attention only, while neither band’s amplitude predicted RT. Correlational; ‘facilitate’ is the authors’ interpretation. | Active — read in full 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1528), from the publisher’s open-access PDF; worth reading as, by its own account, the first human intracranial test of whether phase-amplitude coupling tracks the allocation of spatial attention in fronto-parietal cortex, with careful controls for evoked potentials and power. Its evidence is correlational: coupling strength predicts reaction time in 28 of 123 coupled electrodes, and nothing was manipulated, so it shows association, not that coupling improves attention. |
| LIT-1999 v2 | Methodological considerations for studying neural oscillations | Donoghue, Schaworonkow and Voytek (2021), Eur. J. Neurosci. 55: 3502–3527. Seven methodological considerations for analysing neural oscillations, each demonstrated on simulated data with public code: verify that an oscillation is present; individualize frequency bands; account for dynamic aperiodic 1/f activity, which puts power in every band; examine bursts in single trials; measure waveform shape, since non-sinusoidal rhythms create harmonics and significant phase-amplitude coupling with no interacting rhythms; separate overlapping sources; and check signal-to-noise. Read from the preprint. | Active — read 2026-11-03 (NOTE-1529), from the authors’ PsyArXiv preprint; worth reading as a compact, simulation-backed guide to how spectral measures of field potentials are misread: absent oscillations, shifted peaks, aperiodic 1/f activity, bursts, non-sinusoidal shape, overlapping sources and low SNR. Its waveform-shape section is the reason non-sinusoidal rhythms make phase-amplitude coupling ambiguous. |