Elderly Mental Health Team, Princess Elizabeth Hospital St Martin, Guernsey, UK.
Front Psychol. 2013 May 30;4:304. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00304. eCollection 2013.
If an instance of conscious experience of the seemingly objective world around us could be regarded as a newly formed event memory, much as an instance of mental imagery has the content of a retrieved event memory, and if, therefore, the stream of conscious experience could be seen as evidence for ongoing formation of event memories that are linked into episodic memory sequences, then unitary conscious experience could be defined as a symbolic representation of the pattern of hippocampal neuronal firing that encodes an event memory - a theoretical stance that may shed light into the mind-body and binding problems in consciousness research. Exceedingly detailed symbols that describe patterns of activity rapidly self-organizing, at each cycle of the θ rhythm, in the hippocampus are instances of unitary conscious experience that jointly constitute the stream of consciousness. Integrating object information (derived from the ventral visual stream and orbitofrontal cortex) with contextual emotional information (from the anterior insula) and spatial environmental information (from the dorsal visual stream), the hippocampus rapidly forms event codes that have the informational content of objects embedded in an emotional and spatiotemporally extending context. Event codes, formed in the CA3-dentate network for the purpose of their memorization, are not only contextualized but also allocentric representations, similarly to conscious experiences of events and objects situated in a seemingly objective and observer-independent framework of phenomenal space and time. Conscious perception, creating the spatially and temporally extending world that we perceive around us, is likely to be evolutionarily related to more fleeting and seemingly internal forms of conscious experience, such as autobiographical memory recall, mental imagery, including goal anticipation, and to other forms of externalized conscious experience, namely dreaming and hallucinations; and evidence pointing to an important contribution of the hippocampus to these conscious phenomena will be reviewed.
如果我们周围看似客观世界的意识体验可以被视为新形成的事件记忆，就像心理意象的内容是检索到的事件记忆一样，并且如果因此，意识流可以被视为正在形成的事件记忆的证据，这些事件记忆被链接到情景记忆序列中，那么单一的意识体验可以被定义为编码事件记忆的海马神经元放电模式的符号表示——这一理论立场可能为意识研究中的身心问题和绑定问题提供启示。在海马体中，以 θ 节律为周期，快速自我组织的、描述活动模式的、非常详细的符号是单一意识体验的实例，它们共同构成了意识流。整合对象信息（来自腹侧视觉流和眶额皮层）与上下文情绪信息（来自前岛叶）和空间环境信息（来自背侧视觉流），海马体快速形成具有对象信息的事件代码，这些对象信息嵌入在情感和时空延伸的上下文中。为了记忆目的而在 CA3-齿状回网络中形成的事件代码不仅具有上下文，而且还是非局域的表示，类似于处于现象时空似乎客观和观察者独立的框架中的事件和对象的意识体验。有意识的感知创造了我们周围感知到的空间和时间延伸的世界，可能与更短暂和看似内部的意识体验形式（如自传体记忆回忆、心理意象，包括预期目标）以及其他形式的外部化意识体验（即做梦和幻觉）有关；指向海马体对这些意识现象的重要贡献的证据将被回顾。
