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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences logoLink to Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
. 1998 Nov 29;353(1377):1841–1849. doi: 10.1098/rstb.1998.0336

The neuronal basis for consciousness.

R Llinás 1, U Ribary 1, D Contreras 1, C Pedroarena 1
PMCID: PMC1692417  PMID: 9854256

Abstract

Attempting to understand how the brain, as a whole, might be organized seems, for the first time, to be a serious topic of inquiry. One aspect of its neuronal organization that seems particularly central to global function is the rich thalamocortical interconnectivity, and most particularly the reciprocal nature of the thalamocortical neuronal loop function. Moreover, the interaction between the specific and non-specific thalamic loops suggests that rather than a gate into the brain, the thalamus represents a hub from which any site in the cortex can communicate with any other such site or sites. The goal of this paper is to explore the basic assumption that large-scale, temporal coincidence of specific and non-specific thalamic activity generates the functional states that characterize human cognition.

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Selected References

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