Perceptual Vividness and the Creation of Something from Nothing

Abstract: Our perceptual experiences range from being weak and transient to vivid and intense. Over the past four and a half years at the FIL, I have been working to reveal the neural mechanisms that give rise to this fundamental property of conscious awareness. I will begin by describing a reanalysis of separate MEG and fMRI datasets, where I provide evidence to suggest there exists a graded neural signature for perceptual vividness that is independent of the content of perception. This will lead us to questions about what happens when the vividness of perceptual content is minimal or, in other words, when we experience perceptual absences. I will introduce a hypothesis whereby our ability to perceive absences laid the evolutionary and neural groundwork to conceptualise absences in a symbolic sense, as in the number zero. Such a hypothesis motivates research on zero to further our understanding of the perception of absence more broadly. I will close by describing two interrelated MEG studies that seek to characterise the neural representation of zero in the human brain and establish whether neural representations of absence generalise between perceptual and conceptual domains.