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Binding Problem of Consciousness

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Abstract

This chapter describes several candidate mechanisms that might explain the binding of distributed macroscopic patterns of neuronal activities into a coherent whole. According to current findings, this problem is still unresolved and represents a fundamental problem in neuroscience related to brain coding and integration of distributed neural activities during processes related to perception, cognition, and memory (the “binding problem”). The theory of feature binding originated in the concept of distributed coding and states that neurons involved in the processing of a single object will tend to synchronize firing. This neural activity occurs synchronously across brain regions and likely underlies the integration of diverse brain activities. Together, these findings indicate that the solution to the binding problem may lie in the fundamental problem of consciousness in modern neuroscience. The predominant opinion is that consciousness emerges from a dynamical nucleus of persisting reverberation and interactions of neural groups. Other approaches to the binding problem include nonconventional hypotheses related to various physical theories, such as the complexity theory and the chaos theory.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Neuropsychiatric Research of Traumatic Stress and Department of Psychiatry, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Petr Bob

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Correspondence to Petr Bob .

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Bob, P. (2012). Binding Problem of Consciousness. In: Brain, Mind and Consciousness. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0436-1_2

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