True progress in understanding how experience arises from the brain has been relatively slow when viewed from a historical perspective. Recently, several technologies to study and stimulate the brain have been applied to this field of inquiry. Such progress was made only 2,500 years after the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides first adopted a technical procedure involving the application of formal logic instruments to explore the perception of experiences.

At the phenomenological level, consciousness has been referred to as “what vanishes every night when we fall into dreamless sleep and reappears when we wake up or when we dream. It is also all we are and all we have: lose consciousness and, as far as you are concerned, your own self, and the entire world dissolves into nothingness”. According to the integrated information theory, consciousness is integrated information.

The term “consciousness” therefore has two key senses: wakefulness and awareness. Wakefulness is a state of consciousness distinguished from coma or sleep. Having one's eyes open is generally an indication of wakefulness and we usually assume that anyone who is awake will also be aware. Awareness implies not merely being conscious but also being conscious of something. The broad definition of consciousness includes a large range of processes that we normally regard as unconscious (eg, blindsight or priming by neglected or masked stimuli).

Both sleep and anesthesia are reversible states of eyes-closed unresponsiveness to environmental stimuli in which the individual lacks both wakefulness and awareness. In contrast to sleep, where sufficient stimulation will return the individual to wakefulness, even the most vigorous exogenous stimulation cannot produce awakening in a patient under an adequate level of general anesthesia.

Introduction: Internet game overuse is an emerging disorder and features diminished impulse control and poor reward-processing. In an attempt to understand the neurobiological bases of Internet game overuse, we investigated the differences in regional cerebral glucose metabolism at resting state between young individuals with Internet game overuse and those with normal use using 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography study.

Methods: Twenty right-handed male participants (9 normal users: 24.7±2.4 years of age, 11 overusers: 23.5±2.9 years of age) participated. A trait measure of impulsivity was also completed after scanning.

Results: Internet game overusers showed greater impulsiveness than the normal users and there was a positive correlation between the severity of Internet game overuse and impulsiveness. Imaging data showed that the overusers had increased glucose metabolism in the right middle orbitofrontal gyrus, left caudate nucleus, and right insula, and decreased metabolism in the bilateral postcentral gyrus, left precentrai gyrus, and bilateral occipital regions compared to normal users.

Conclusion: Internet game overuse may be associated with abnormal neurobiological mechanisms in the orbitofrontal cortex, striatum, and sensory regions, which are implicated in impulse control, reward processing, and somatic representation of previous experiences. Our results support the idea that Internet game overuse shares psychological and neural mechanisms with other types of impulse control disorders and substance/non-substance-related addiction.

Introduction: Late in utero exposure to antidepressants has been suspected of adversely impacting pregnancy outcome and compromising neonatal adaptation. Hence, the necessity exists to analyze published information on antidepressant use during late pregnancy to individuate potential recurrent patterns of iatrogenic complications.

Methods: Computerized searches on MEDLINE, PsyclNFO, ENBASE, and Cochrane Library through February 10, 2010 were performed for selecting literature information and investigating the safety of antidepressants when used during late pregnancy.

Results: Antidepressant treatment during late pregnancy may increase the rates of poor pregnancy outcome and neonatal withdrawal/ toxic reactions.

Conclusions: Because both gestational complications and neonatal adverse events acknowledge the same etiology, the author suggests including such iatrogenic events under the definition of prenatal antidepressant exposure syndrome, in order to increase clinicians' awareness about the spectrum of risks which may concern the mother-infant pair when antidepressant treatment is deemed indispensable during late pregnancy.

Background: This analysis evaluated the effects of the serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, desvenlafaxine (administered as desvenlafaxine succinate), on anxiety symptoms associated with depression.

Methods: Data were pooled from 9 randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, 8 week studies of desvenlafaxine (50-400 mg/day, fixed or flexible dose) in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), without a primary anxiety diagnosis. Changes from baseline in scores on the anxiety/somatization factor of the 17-item Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D17) and on the Covi Anxiety Scale at the final evaluation (last observation carried forward) were compared between desvenlafaxine and placebo groups using analysis of covariance.

Results: In the overall data set (intent to treat n=2,913 [desvenlafaxine, n=1,805; placebo, n=1,108]), desvenlafaxine was associated with significantly greater reductions compared with placebo in scores on the HAM-D17 anxiety/somatization factor (-3.41 vs -2.92, P<.001) and Covi Anxiety Scale (-1.35 vs -1.04, P<.001). In the subset of fixed-dose studies, significant differences were observed for all dose groups on the HAM-D17 anxiety/somatization factor (P≤.OH), and for the 50, 100, and 200 mg/day dose groups on the Covi Anxiety Scale (all P≤.015 vs placebo).

Conclusions: Desvenlafaxine was associated with significantly greater improvement in anxiety symptoms compared with placebo in patients with MDD.