The Science of Consciousness - Tucson 2022

For junkies of consciousness and altered states thereof, as in anesthesia or psychedelic-induced states, a browsing of the abstracts submitted for The Science of Consciousness 2022 in Tucson April 18-22 makes for stimulating reading (though I found pauses to recover from input overload to be necessary.) I attended the first “Towards a Science of Consciousness” - now known as TSC “The Science of Consciousness” - in 1994, as well as a number of subsequent meetings, and it was encouragement from several then luminaries in the field that emboldened me to turn the lecture notes from my “Biology of Mind” course at the University of Wisconsin into a book of that title which was published in 1999. There are numerous bon-bons to be found in this year's set of abstracts, one example from many being Huang’s noting of his work on how the anterior insula, situated between unimodal and transmodal cortical areas along the brain’s primary functional gradient, regulates the default mode – dorsal attention network transitions, and gates conscious access of sensory information.