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The mnemonic basis of subjective experience

Nature Reviews Psychology volume 1, pages 479–488 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Conscious experiences involve subjective qualities, such as colours, sounds, smells and emotions. In this Perspective, we argue that these subjective qualities can be understood in terms of their similarity to other experiences. This account highlights the role of memory in conscious experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels depends on implicit memory of the relationships between different perceptual representations within the brain. With more complex experiences such as emotions, explicit memories are also recruited. We draw inspiration from work in machine learning as well as the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making to make our case and discuss how the account could be tested in future experiments. The resulting findings might help to reveal the functions of subjective experience and inform current theoretical debates on consciousness.

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Fig. 1: An example mental quality space for colour.
Fig. 2: The higher-order mnemonic account of consciousness.
Fig. 3: Prefrontal cortex connections with memory systems.

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Acknowledgements

S.M.F. is funded by a Wellcome/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellowship (206648/Z/17/Z) and a Philip Leverhulme Prize from the Leverhulme Trust. The Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203147/Z/16/Z). The Max Planck UCL Centre is a joint initiative supported by UCL and the Max Planck Society.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Consciousness, RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Wako, Japan

    Hakwan Lau

  2. Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Matthias Michel

  3. Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, NY, USA

    Joseph E. LeDoux

  4. Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK

    Stephen M. Fleming

  5. Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, London, UK

    Stephen M. Fleming

  6. Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, UK

    Stephen M. Fleming

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  1. Hakwan Lau
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  2. Matthias Michel
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  3. Joseph E. LeDoux
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  4. Stephen M. Fleming
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H.L. led the writing and all other authors contributed equally to the remaining aspects of the article.

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Correspondence to Hakwan Lau.

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Nature Reviews Psychology thanks Peter Fazekas, Rafael Malach and the other, anonymous, reviewer for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Lau, H., Michel, M., LeDoux, J.E. et al. The mnemonic basis of subjective experience. Nat Rev Psychol 1, 479–488 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00068-6

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