Musio C Musio – författare

For a few decades, the puzzle of consciousness, which for centuries was analysed by philosophers, has been finding a wide interest in the scientific field, where previously it was not entitled to be a member. It has become one of the most-debated problems in the cognitive sciences. The anatomical bases, neurophysiological correlates and elementary mechanisms underlying complex processes arising with consciousness have been compared with the psychological (perceptive, cognitive, volitive, emotional) aspects of conscious expressions, in normal and pathological conditions. Various theories, which attempt to fit systematically and coherently neural and psychological data, have been debated, proving the emergence of the phenomenon of consciousness.

Perception is the first step in the whole of the cognitive processes (attention, learning, memory, categorization, imagery, intuition, inference, comprehension, thought, judgement, expression) which culminate in the reasoning activity and to which emotions make a contribution. The production of perception representations is correlated with the perception events. Such perception representations occur by means of the contribution of two kinds of factors: sensory signals which reproduce the spatio-temporal characteristics of the receptor modifications, and interpretation of the intrinsic ambiguity of such signals by means of unconscious inferences. Various interactions intervene between bottom-up signals from peripheral receptors and top-down signals from higher centres.