English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

While the presence or absence of consciousness plays the central role in the moral/ethical decisions when dealing with patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), recently it is criticized as not adequate due to number of reasons, among which are the lack of the uniform definition of consciousness and consequently uncertainty of diagnostic criteria for it, as well as irrelevance of some forms of consciousness for determining a patient’s interests and wishes. In her article, Dr. Specker Sullivan reexamined the meaning of consciousness in the DOC taxonomy and proposed to go away from the routinely used clinical definition of consciousness as ‘‘wakeful awareness’’, and adopt the meaning that is common in the Eastern tradition which is a form of ‘‘pure experience’’ (Specker Sullivan 2018). She further argued that understanding consciousness as a ‘‘pure experience’’ is ethically relevant for DOC patients. This suggestion is original, novel and important since it preserves the importance of the notion of consciousness for the clinical practice while simultaneously offering an additional ethical tool for the moral decisions in medicine. At the same time, without placing such Eastern notion in the Western tradition it is difficult to see how pure experience could be usefully operationalized to make sense in the clinical practice with DOC patients. It is so because pure experience is a subjective phenomenon which is completely inaccessible in noncommunicative DOC patients and also it does not express behaviorally (Monti et al. 2010), therefore some objective-like operationalization is needed. This is why the fusion of Eastern and Western traditions is required to gain the full potential of Dr. Specker Sullivan’s suggestion. We propose that such fusion could be achieved on the basis of the Operational Architectonics (OA) theory of brain–mind functioning (Fingelkurts et al. 2010, 2013a) which suits ideally the purpose due its compatibility with both Western and Eastern traditions of consciousness. In short, the OA theory states that local fields of transient functional neuronal assemblies (functional coalitions of individual neurons) are equivalent to elemental operations which can be conscious (phenomenal) in a sense that they self-present phenomenal features or qualia. Such simple operations are reflected in the local electrical brain fields (that could be reliably measured by electroencephalogram—EEG) in the form of quasi-stationary segments, which can be conceptualized as standing waves within a 3D volume (Fingelkurts et al. 2010, 2013a). These segments are temporally limited in time, so that their lifetime is marked by so-called rapid transitive periods (RTPs). As a matter of fact, the totality of all infinitely many local fields undergoes a continuous sequence of transitions on multiple temporal scales resulting in enormous multivariability of possible phenomenal features (qualia) (Déli et al. 2017). However, to have a full experience of any phenomenal object, including the self, several features/elements of that object (shape, color, smell, texture, etc.) should be spatially and temporally integrated. In agreement with the OA theory, different (simple) phenomenal features that are presented in the brain by local fields/operations generated by different transient neuronal assemblies are temporal synchronized (coupled together) to self-present complex phenomenal objects (and the self being one of such objects, Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts 2011; Fingelkurts et al. 2012b). As a result of such dynamic and self-organized process, metastable brain states—operational modules (OMs)—emerge (Fingelkurts et al. 2010, 2013a). Thus, according to the OA theory, any complex phenomenal object has internal structure where every element in its turn also has its own internal structure and so on, all the way down to the simplest elemental This is a commentary on ‘‘Pure experience and disorders of consciousness’’ by Laura Specker Sullivan.

Placing pure experience of Eastern tradition into the neurophysiology of Western tradition