Consciousness & Mental Awareness Research Team

Welcome to CO&MA – Consciousness & Mental Awareness Research Team

Consciousness & Mental Awareness (CO&MA) is a Proaction Lab team, bringing together researchers studying the neuroscience and neuropsychology of CONSCIOUSNESS. The team is led by Óscar F. Gonçalves, a full professor of Neuropsychology at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences (University of Coimbra), and integrates researchers, clinicians, and students from the University of Coimbra and partner institutions in Portugal, Italy, Holland, Brazil and the USA. In CO&MA we attempt to: (1) decode the neuronal mechanisms contrasting automatic/implicit/unconscious from deliberate/explicit/conscious processing; (2) understand the neurodynamics of unconscious/conscious processing in awake and sleep stages; (3) characterize and modulate the brain mechanisms in extreme consciousness conditions (from altered states of consciousness to consciousness disorders).

A Message From the Team Leader

Professor Óscar F. Gonçalves

Select YouTube options for captions in English

“The ‘images’ that constitute our minds are the results of the well-regimented neural activity that transmits such patterns into the brain. In other words, neurobiological ‘mapped patterns’ turn into the ‘mental events’ we call images. And when these events are part of a context that includes feeling and self-perspective, then, and only then, they become mental experiences, which is to say that they become conscious.”

António Damásio – Feeling & Knowing (2021)

Research Scope

Every day, our consciousness seems to fade away. When we fall asleep, the awareness of what is happening within and around us gives place to a state of apparent “coma”, in which, temporarily, we cease to be conscious of ourselves and the world.

Does consciousness cease completely or is there still room for some “islands” of consciousness in deep sleep? And what happens during complex dream narratives when consciousness seems to be temporarily regained?

It is not only during sleep that consciousness witnesses dramatic changes. In wakefulness, for example, we often oscillate between moments of a full awareness and others in which our consciousness decouples from current perception, entering a mind wandering state.

Consciousness research faces even more fascinating challenges – altered states of consciousness–going from out-of-body experiences to states of aesthetic absorption, lucid dreaming and even the phenomenology of near-death experiences (altered state of consciousness during life-threatening circumstances and characterized by visual illusions or hallucinations, mystical or transcendental experiences, recall of events of life and strong emotional intensity).

In Co&MA we believe that, by studying all these phenomena, we may contribute to the identification of core neuronal signatures of consciousness and, ultimately, improve our understanding and clinic response to some of the most severe disorders of consciousness.