Abstract

Francisco Varela's lifetime work was oriented to find a connection between conscious phenomena and the neuronal mechanisms associated to them. A current approach to this problem consists of the analysis of synchronic activity among groups of distributed neurons in the brain. Varela made an outstanding contribution to neuroscience by establishing a relation between conscious perception in humans and the generation of widespread networks of synchronic neural activity in the cerebral cortex. However, in my opinion the more elusive problem of how subjective sensory sensations originate in our brains remains without a clear answer