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Does Time Help to Understand Consciousness?

In response to our target paper on the possible role of temporal binding for consciousness (Engel et al., 1999), a number of arguments have been raised that, to varying degrees and on varying grounds, doubt the validity of our approach. To facilitate understanding of the key points in the debate, we will first summarize the essential statements of our paper. Subsequently, we will respond to the objections formulated in various contributions to this special issue (Gold, 1999; Hardcastle, 1999; Kurthen, 1999; Revonsuo, 1999; Vanni, 1999). A separate section of our commentary is devoted to the paper authored by Zeki & Bartels (1999), which describes an alternative view on the relation between binding and consciousness. The hypothesis discussed in our target paper can be summarized as follows. The key idea is that synchronization on a millisecond time scale may serve to express specific relations in distributed activity patterns and, thus, accomplishes dynamic binding of information carried by different network elements. Such a mechanism has the advantage that it raises jointly and with high temporal resolution the saliency of coherent subsets of signals, because downstream neuronal populations respond better to synchronized than to temporally dispersed spikes. For this reason, it is ideally suited to mediate selective transmission of coherent responses and, thus, for gating the access of relevant signals to phenomenal consciousness. As described in our paper, a large body of evidence has accumulated which supports the notion that response synchronization is involved in selection and binding of distributed responses. In particular, our study of binocular rivalry in awake cats (Fries et al., 1997) suggests that synchronization is involved in gating access of signals to awareness. In primary visual cortex synchronization of neuronal responses, rather than average activity levels, was found to correlate with the perceptual selection of signals. Together with recent evidence obtained in humans (Herrmann et al., 1999; Muller et al., 1997; Revonsuo et al., 1997; Rodriguez et al., 1999; Tallon et al., 1995), these data suggest that only well-synchronized neuronal responses can contribute to perception