We have summarized the main contributions of the project as a novel neurobiological theory of consciousness (Aru et al., 2020a), which hopefully will provide useful insights for several fields. For example, for cognitive science our work provides a concrete neurobiological foundation for understanding the effects of prior knowledge and expectations on perception. Our theory also helps to better understand the potential neurobiological implementations of the predictive processing framework. In neuroscience, our work suggests many new experiments aiming to understand internally generated perception. For artificial intelligence our results provide a biological basis for understanding the success of attention mechanisms for machine translation and deep learning.
Our paper on the neurobiological mechanisms of internally driven perception (Aru et al., 2020b) will be useful for researchers from various fields. First, here we proposed a concrete neural mechanism of hallucinations, which will be of interest for scholars working on schizophrenia. Second, the neural mechanisms are amenable to testing by the neuroscience community. Third, as the paper also discusses the effects of neuromodulation on L5p cells and internally generated perception, the work will guide further experiments on the field of neuromodulatory effects on cognition. Finally, the paper will be of interest for researchers working on sleep and dreaming.
Taken together, we have shown that it is essential to take into account that cortical pyramidal cells have two distinct parts. Through their interactions we can better understand central phenomena of our mental worlds. This project, through studying the neural mechanisms of conscious experience, predictions and illusory perception advances our understanding of the neural mechanisms that underlie our mental lives.
