At the Cyclotron Research Centre of the University of Liège, the researchers in the Coma Science Group put new technology to work in order to determine a level for residual consciousness in cerebral injury patients and techniques for trying to establish contact with them. They showed that patients in minimally conscious states could feel physical pain. Around the borders of their research, a question about the status of consciousness as such is indicated. And this theme is also at the centre of a book co-edited by Steven Laureys.

Consciousness is a notion that lacks clarity, inasmuch as there is no real consensus about how to define it. Sometimes this dispute retards the unification of the major concepts involved, but sometimes it seems worth it in order to stimulate debate. This lack of consensus is a reflection of the degree to which consciousness is relatively badly understood. It is the weakness, although by the same token the richness of the book, Neurology of Consciousness(1) which will appear this fall, published by Elsevier Academic Press and edited by Giulio Tononi, of the School of Medicine of the University of Wisconsin and Steven Laureys, research coordinator - FNRS and leader of the Coma Science Group at the Cyclotron Research Centre (CRC) of the ULg.

The book contains twenty-eight chapters. Each was written by eminent specialists concerned with the question of consciousness and the pathologies that affect it. The book maintains an alternation between the perspectives of clinical neurologists and researchers in neuroscience, sometimes combined in one person. A contrast between the two approaches is evident when one makes reference, for example, to the suggestions of Antonio Damasio, whose research is carried out from an almost philosophical perspective, and then to Hal Blumenfeld, whose concerns are more directly focused on his patient.

“For books like that, the hardest thing for an editor is to get great authors, who get asked to do lots of things, to participate in a project,” Steven Laureys tells us. “Another thing was to try to get the book to have a guiding thread, to make sure it has a certain structure and logic that give it some unity.” Bringing about the second objective might seem almost impossible because Neurology of Consciousness is not an article but a sort of kaleidoscope where over 30 authors look at consciousness from different angles, and do not all come to an agreement. One thing is certain: in the changing state of the assertions and the questions of the moment, this work gives us a very complete account of the state of our knowledge at present concerning consciousness and its neuronal correlates.

A few examples of the subjects covered: the neurological assay of consciousness, functional neuroimagery, the relationship between consciousness and attention, sleeping and dreaming, sleep-walking, general anaesthesia and consciousness, coma, cerebral death, minimally conscious states, consciousness and dementia, epilepsy and consciousness, “brain-computer” interfacing for paralyzed patients, neuroethics and disturbances of consciousness, the hippocampus, memory and consciousness, transitory amnesic syndromes, near-death experiences...

(1) The Neurology of consciousness, Steven Laureys and Giulio Tononi, Elsevier, Academic Press, october 2008.