CONCEPT
Neural Correlates of Consciousness
The minimal physical mechanism in the brain whose activity is sufficient for a specific conscious experience—the methodological fulcrum of the Koch-Crick program and the most productive empirical strategy the science of mind has yet found.
The neural correlates of consciousness, or NCC, is the concept that anchored a program: rather than solving the mystery of why there is any experience at all, find the
physical footprints that experience leaves in neural tissue. Francis Crick and
Christof Koch proposed in 1990 that for any given conscious experience—the seeing of a face, the hearing of a note—there exists a minimal pattern of neural activity sufficient to produce it, and that this pattern could be identified empirically by holding the stimulus constant while the subject’s experience changed. The strategy is radical in its modesty: it sets aside
the hard problem and investigates only the correlational structure, trusting that a complete map of what accompanies experience will eventually dissolve the residual mystery. What the NCC program established is that behavior is not evidence of
consciousness—a subject can report seeing a face whether or not the seeing was conscious, and the science advances precisely by finding the brain