Conscious experience and episodic memory: hippocampus at the crossroads

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Philosophy of Mind

Background:

• Conscious experience is often studied in isolation from memory.
• The relationship between perception, memory, and subjective experience remains complex.
• Existing theories struggle to explain the subjective unity of conscious experience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a theoretical framework defining unitary conscious experience as a form of event memory.
• To explore the role of hippocampal neuronal firing patterns in encoding conscious experience.
• To investigate the implications of this theory for understanding the mind-body and binding problems.

Main Methods:

• Theoretical analysis integrating neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
• Conceptualization of conscious experience as a symbolic representation of hippocampal activity.
• Review of evidence linking hippocampal function to various conscious phenomena.

Main Results:

• Unitary conscious experience can be defined as a symbolic representation of hippocampal neuronal firing encoding event memories.
• The hippocampus integrates object, emotional, and spatial information to form contextualized, allocentric event codes.
• These event codes mirror the observer-independent framework of phenomenal space and time.

Conclusions:

• Conscious perception is evolutionarily linked to memory recall, mental imagery, dreaming, and hallucinations.
• The hippocampus plays a crucial role in forming and retrieving event memories that constitute conscious experience.
• This event memory theory provides a novel perspective on the nature of consciousness and its neural underpinnings.