Searching through journals that are available to me, I’ve actually been able to find quite a bit on the topic of consciousness and the brain. Here’s some of it:
"In mammals, consciousness seems to be specifically associated with the thalamus and cortex (Baars, Banks, & Newman, 2003). Regions such as the hippocampal system and cerebellum can be damaged without a loss of consciousness per se. Indeed, in cases like Rasmussen encephalitis, an entire hemisphere can be surgically removed without a loss of consciousness (although a form of blindsight can occur after surgery for this condition; see Tomaiuolo, Ptito, Marzi, Paus, & Ptito, 1997). Damage to the brainstem, including the thalamus, can abolish the state of consciousness; but a very local lesion in sensory cortex may delete only specific conscious features such as color vision, visual motion, conscious experiences of visual objects and faces, and the like. Such cortical damage does not disrupt the state of consciousness, but changes its contents.
To a first approximation, the lower brainstem is involved in maintaining the state of consciousness, while the cortex (interacting with thalamus) sustains conscious contents. No other brain regions have been shown to possess these properties."
“Together, these first three properties indicate that consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast, low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. Unconscious states are markedly different and much less responsive to sensory input or endogenous activity. These properties are directly testable and constitute necessary criteria for consciousness in humans.”
“Consciousness presents an extraordinary range of contents—perception in the different senses, imagery, emotional feelings, concepts, inner speech, and action-related ideas. This broad range suggests that consciousness involves many interacting, yet functionally differentiated, brain regions. Visual cortex has now been shown to be involved in conscious visual events (e.g., Sheinberg & Logothetis, 1997). Recent studies show prefrontal activity for “fringe conscious” events such as mental effort and the tip-of-the-tongue state (Maril, Wagner, & Schacter, 2001). An integrative concept of consciousness must therefore involve many brain regions as well as the interactions among them, along with the ability to recruit regions such as hippocampus (for conscious episodic storage and recall) and cerebellum (for conscious feedback control of fine motor skills).”
"A conscious perception is a complex phenomenon which evolves through several sequential steps; therefore it is conceivably associated with widespread patterns of brain activity. Block (1997) argues for a conceptual distinction between ‘phenomenal’ and ‘access’ consciousness. While phenomenal consciousness refers to the subjective aspect of experience, access consciousness refers to the direct control of experience through reasoning, reporting, or action.Visual awareness is the most studied type of conscious perception in normal and abnormal humans as well as animals. Some neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies of visual awareness (Logothetis, 1998 and Tong et al., 1998) have concentrated on the role of the ventral stream and have not typically considered the potential role of fronto-parietal activations. However, more recent studies suggest that joint activation of category-specific regions in the ventral stream and activity in parietal and prefrontal areas might be crucial for visual awareness (Rees et al., 2002). Our selected fMRI and PET studies of conscious perception, summarized in Table 4, confirm this view. "
Just a few bits and pieces from some abstracts…
