Neural correlates of consciousness

Neural correlates of consciousness are the minimal neural processes that reliably accompany a particular conscious experience, distinguished from processes that merely enable or report it.

Consciousness: Consciousness is the condition of having subjective experience or awareness. Neural correlates are proposed neural counterparts of conscious experience.
Phenomenal consciousness: Phenomenal consciousness is the felt, subjective character of an experience. A correlate may track the felt content even without deliberate report.
Binocular rivalry: Binocular rivalry occurs when different images shown to each eye alternate in conscious perception. Perception changes while the visual stimulus stays fixed, helping isolate neural correlates of experience.
Neural prerequisites of consciousness: Neural prerequisites are brain processes required for conscious experience but not themselves sufficient to constitute it. Separating prerequisites from minimal correlates is central to defining the target.
Hard problem of consciousness: The hard problem asks why and how physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. Identifying correlates may describe neural associations without explaining why experience occurs.
Recurrent processing theory: Recurrent processing theory holds that feedback among cortical areas is sufficient for visual consciousness. It identifies recurrent cortical activity as a candidate neural correlate of visual experience.
Access consciousness: Access consciousness is information being available for reasoning, deliberate action, and verbal report. It may accompany experience without constituting its neural correlate.
Visual masking: Visual masking is the reduction or elimination of a visual stimulus's visibility by another stimulus. Varying visibility provides a way to compare neural activity with reported visual awareness.
Neural consequences of consciousness: Neural consequences are brain processes caused by conscious experience, such as memory encoding or deliberate action. They can accompany reported experience yet occur downstream from its neural correlate.
Explanatory gap: The explanatory gap is the apparent divide between physical descriptions and explanations of subjective experience. A complete map of correlates may leave this explanatory divide unresolved.

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