title: Conscious brain, metacognition and schizophrenia.
abstract: Recent findings indicate that the binding and synchronization of distributed neural activities are crucial for cognitive processes and consciousness. In addition, there is increasing evidence that disrupted feature binding is related to experiences of disintegration of consciousness in schizophrenia. These data suggest that the disrupted binding and disintegration of consciousness could be typically related to schizophrenia in terms of Bleuler's concept of "splitting". In this context, deficits in metacognitive capacity in schizophrenia may be conceptualized as a spectrum from more discrete to more synthetic activities, related to specific levels of neural binding and neurocognitive deficits. This review summarizes the recent research on metacognition and its relationship to deficits of conscious awareness that may be found in schizophrenia patients. Deficits in synthetic metacognition are likely linked to the integration of information during specific processes of neural binding. Those in turn may be related to a range of mental activities including reasoning style, learning potential and insight.
authors.affiliation: Center for Neuropsychiatric Research of Traumatic Stress, Department of Psychiatry and UHSL, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic; Central European Institute of Technology, Faculty of Medicine, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. Electronic address: petrbob@netscape.net.
authors.forename: Petr
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Bob
authors.affiliation: Center for Neuropsychiatric Research of Traumatic Stress, Department of Psychiatry and UHSL, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic; Psychotherapeutic and Psychosomatic Clinic ESET, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Ondrej
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Pec
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Psychology, The Chicago School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Aaron L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Mishara
authors.affiliation: Center for Neuropsychiatric Research of Traumatic Stress, Department of Psychiatry and UHSL, First Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic.
authors.forename: Tereza
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Touskova
authors.affiliation: Roudebush VA Medical Center, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA; Department of Psychiatry, Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Paul H
authors.initials: PH
authors.lastname: Lysaker
mesh_terms: D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D003243:Consciousness / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology*
keywords: Brain binding; Information integration; Metacognition; Schizophrenia