Psychopathology
January 1, 2023
Joanna Szczotka, Michał Wierzchoń
4 citations
Heautoscopy is a rare experience where a person sees a double of their own body while feeling uncertain about where their self is located and sensing that the illusory body belongs to them. It occurs in diverse conditions like schizophrenia, brain tumors, migraine, epilepsy, and depression. A review of over 140 case studies found only 9 that met strict criteria for heautoscopy, distinguishing it from similar phenomena such as autoscopy and out-of-body experiences, which are often mislabeled. From the patient's perspective, heautoscopy feels like a bodily illusion rather than a false belief. The sense of being in two places at once arises from shifting self-location and expanded body ownership, not from having two viewpoints. The phenomenon offers insight into how the brain constructs bodily boundaries and spatial perspective.
Psychophysiology
July 1, 2025
Kinga Ciupińska, Marcin Koculak, Michał Bola et al.
2 citations
Comparing brain signals for visual and auditory conscious awareness in the same people shows that early awareness negativity (VAN and AAN) relates to awareness in both senses, but late positivity (LP) relates to awareness only for vision. Visual components also reach consciousness faster than auditory ones. No correlations between modalities in perceptual thresholds or ERP latencies and amplitudes suggest visual and auditory awareness mechanisms are largely separate and modality-specific, not tracking consciousness independently of content.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
April 2, 2026
Maja Wójcik, Paweł Orłowski, Stanisław Adamczyk et al.
Long-term naturalistic psychedelic users who had abstained for at least 30 days showed largely no significant differences in brain oscillatory power, signal complexity, or network connectivity compared to non-users, contrary to patterns seen in acute administration studies. Complexity was unexpectedly lower in users during eyes-open conditions. Effective connectivity within and between key brain networks (Default Mode, Salience, Central Executive) showed no group differences after correction. These null findings suggest that repeated psychedelic use may not produce lasting neurophysiological changes detectable in resting-state EEG during abstinence, possibly due to homeostatic adaptation or individual variability.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 20, 2022
Marcin Koculak, Michał Wierzchoń
Complexity measures, especially those from Integrated Information Theory, have been useful for distinguishing different states of consciousness (e.g., awake versus asleep) but have rarely been applied to studying the specific content of conscious experience. This paper argues that investigating how complexity relates to what we are conscious of is essential for understanding the role of information-theoretic measures in consciousness research. The authors outline how conscious content could be experimentally operationalized and how basic testable hypotheses can be formulated without relying on the formal apparatus of IIT. Such an approach could improve understanding of which aspects of consciousness complexity captures and facilitate comparisons between different theories of consciousness.
Consciousness and cognition
August 1, 2019
Monika Derda, Marcin Koculak, Bert Windey et al.
Electrophysiological signatures of visual awareness can be distinguished from other task-related processes by manipulating the level of processing of visual stimuli. In an EEG experiment, 36 subjects performed either color (low-level) or magnitude (high-level) evaluations of masked digits and rated their subjective visibility. Mean amplitude in the VAN component time window (140-240 ms) correlated with visibility ratings in both conditions. Mean amplitude in the LP time window (380-480 ms) correlated with visibility ratings only in the high-level condition. These results support a temporal unfolding of ERP markers of conscious processing: an early component reflects initial perceptual experience, while a late component correlates with conscious experience of non-perceptual information.