The simplest and perhaps the first notion of consciousness in the West as a “sentience or awareness of internal or external existence” was introduced in the Seventeenth century by the English physician Robert Fludd, though similar and even more refined notions of consciousness were developed centuries before in Indian philosophy and contemplative wisdom traditions.

Because it permeates human existence in so many different ways, the study of consciousness is a profoundly interdisciplinary endeavour and engages disciplines such as philosophy (including Eastern philosophy), cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, psychiatry and psychopathology, and even physics.

The study of consciousness may involve domains as diverse as perceptual awareness, cognition and metacognition, reasoning, executive control, theory of mind, self, sleep and dreaming, emotional competence and empathy. It concerns both healthy (e.g., aging, meditation, spiritual experiences) and pathological conditions (e.g., epilepsy, neglect and locked-in syndromes, minimally conscious states, anesthesia), and involves considerations operating at different time scales (e.g., evolution, development, expertise).

Today, however, and despite almost thirty years of concerted interdisciplinary efforts, the nature and mechanisms of consciousness remain as elusive as ever.

Theoretically, different conceptual frameworks aimed at characterizing both its functional and phenomenal aspects take sometimes radically different assumptions as their starting point but often fail to make sufficiently precise differential predictions to be falsifiable. While most recent views generally consider methods investigating human higher-order (reflective or access) consciousness, the theoretical and experimental foundations of primary (proto-) consciousness often remain vague and ignore evolutitonary considerations. Influential distinctions, such as the distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, between pre-reflective (minimal) and the reflective (narrative) self, between graded and all-or-none processing, or even between conscious and unconscious processing all remain unsettled or controversial.

The field is also rife with methodological challenges and controversies, some of which remain largely unsolved. Questions such as how to best measure awareness or to how establish its absence; issues such as what kind of neuroscientific data would convincingly make it possible to isolate the neural correlates of consciousness or what types of confounds contaminate extant findings; challenges such as how to imagine crucial experiments that are sufficiently sensitive to falsify some theoretical proposals all need to be addressed in open, interdisciplinary dialogue.

This Frontiers Research Topic is aimed at stimulating discussion about current methodological issues and trends in consciousness research. We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions as well as empirical articles from both experts and young scientists who work in the field of consciousness research. Submissions of related hypotheses, original research articles, case reports, perspectives, reviews, opinions, and commentaries are welcome. We very much hope that this Frontiers Research Topic will contribute to enhancing our characterization and understanding of the methodological and conceptual challenges associated with the study human consciousness.

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