PSYCHONEUROLOGICAL DYNAMISMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS¹
Aníbal Silveira
Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Jundiaí, SP, Brazil
Consciousness cannot mean a single psychic function, but a complex operation (Fig. 1) involving affectivity, conation and intelligence, as well as connective brain functions, sensory and motor. Even vigilance or alertness, its necessary condition, requires many kinds of functioning, from the vegetative stimuli up to the cognitive process, which may be detected at different levels (Fig. 2). Eventhough an intellectual process, it depends fundamentally on the affective and conative spheres of personality, as does its functional basis, the process of cognition, and consciousness proper, both originated at the affective área (Fig. 4): one towards reality, Other towards life experience. Normally, logical thinking shifts towards daydreaming (Fig. 4), or experience not conscious comes out (analytical procedure). Pathology may disconnect awareness regarding outer world from experience (“second” personality), or elicit acting out with no logical guidance (twilight states), or aggressive outbursts (rage) as well. Since consciousness implies complex functional systems (Fig. 5), one cannot “localize” it. However, to such psychic systems underly cerebral systems, which nowadays neuronography discloses (Fig. 6). The loci found out may Simply be part of the paths conveying affective, or conative, impulses towards the intellectual áreas. Most important among these are the cerebelo-cerebral pathways, also predicted and already demonstrated (Fig. 7).
Figs:
Associative processes (image to signal)
Vigilance (stimuli x regulation)
Audiffrent’s principle
Accessory and principal components of image (Laffitte)
Cerebral systems
Suppressive áreas
B. Arnold’s scheme
¹Trabalho apresentado no 11 th Congress of Neurology, Amsterdam, Holanda, setembro/1977