- Extended consciousness
In
biological psychology , extended consciousness is an animal's autobiographical self-perception.Extended consciousness is said to arise in the
brain of animals with substantial capacity formemory andreason . It does not necessarily requirelanguage . The perception of a historic and future self arises from a stream of information from the immediate environment and from neural structures related to memory.A neurology department chairman from
University of Iowa College of Medicine popularized the concept.Antonio Damasio theorized extended consciousness to arise in the structures in thehuman brain he described as "image spaces" and "dispositional spaces".Image spaces imply areas where sensory impressions of all types are processed, including the focused awareness of the
core consciousness . Dispositional spaces include convergence zones, which are networks in the brain where memories are processed and recalled, and where knowledge is merged with immediate experience.Image processing in the cerebrum is regionally specific to various senses, but is highly distributed and interconnected, with images such as visual, spatial and perhaps linguistic impressions stored in diverse areas then assembled when recalled as a thought. Likewise, neural convergence zones are widely distributed in the lobes of the
cerebral cortex .While humans are theorized to share extended consciousness with some animals, theorized neural mechanisms for extended consciousness do not provide answers to philosophical or cosmological questions about
consciousness such as why we perceive ourselves as a limited part of a largeruniverse .
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