Engine of Consciousness in Brain - A Review

Abstract

Consciousness is the cognitive faculty which is evolved by natural selection and it has designed a sense of ourselves and our surroundings. The cerebral cortex is ‘the seat of consciousness’ in humans and mammals. The salient features of consciousness, they are human consciousness exists, involves short term memory, it occurs independently of sensory inputs, it displays steerable attentions, has capacity for attentive interpretations of complex or ambiguous data, consciousness disappears in a deep sleep and finally, it harbours the contents of several basic modalities within a single unified experience. The consciousness depends on the ascending projections from the dorsal brainstem that form the ascending reticular activating system. The engine of consciousness depends mainly on the brain's activity of sustaining rich dynamics in neural activity. The aim of the present review is to study the neuroscientific aspects of consciousness and thereby, the present scope of retrieving people out of consciousness and to consciousness disorders. This research was conceived as a scoping literature review. This review has accessed existing reviews and researches in the last decade mostly, through PMC database, MeSH, Google Scholar, Pubmed, Medline, CrossRef. Considered research was limited to manuscripts related to English, to consciousness, anaesthetic drugs relations, and Alzheimer's disease. This review excluded non-english researches, other neurological disorders not related to consciousness, physiological impairment of consciousness. Quality of articles used was assessed using Quality assessment tools and graded as strong, moderate and weak. The description of the included studies for the review is tabulated.