Consistent with Seamon et al., we found that conscious activation of a related lure during study was not necessary for its subsequent recognition; consistent with Zeelenberg et al., we found no evidence for recognition of related lures under conditions where there was no memory for studied words.
Nonconscious compared with conscious activation of conditioned placebo analgesia was associated with increased activation of the orbitofrontal cortex, a structure with direct connections to affective brain regions and basic reward processing.
If sleep promoted an off-line reorganization of neural task representations depending on either hippocampo-cortical or conscious control activations, this neural re-structuring would be manifested by a spatial re-distribution of negative SPs after sleep, or by magnitude reduction due to facilitation of processing.
Extended – seconds or minutes-long – exposures to relevant cocaine[9] and sexual[10], [11] stimuli can trigger conscious desire and activation of interconnected limbic (e.g., amygdala, striatum/pallidum, orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, insula and medial prefrontal cortex) brain regions important in reward learning[12].
We used functional neuroimaging during a within-subject paradigm of conscious and nonconscious activation of conditioned placebo and nocebo responses.
These definitions concur in describing elements of a process whereby behaviour is contextually cued, without conscious thought, via activation of a mental context-behaviour association learned through context-consistent performances.
Electrodes were used to mimic the changes in brain activity that occur when a mouse learns to associate a visual stimulus with a reward: this involved repeatedly activating the visual cortex in a conscious mouse, followed by activation of the ventral tegmental area.
This type of activation is conscious and fluctuates in a controlled manner, on the basis of subjective decisions.
A within-subject comparison of nocebo responses during nonconscious versus conscious trials revealed higher activation of the brainstem, thalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus (Table 1; Figure 2).
Data in the following section support the hypothesis that glycolytic flux is enhanced compared with oxidative metabolism during brain activation in conscious subjects and is linked to lactate release.
For example, 'pain-related' brain activity from noxious stimulation can occur in patients in minimally conscious states but such activations do not necessarily prove pain perception in these individuals.
