Human brain mapping
May 1, 2015
Morten Joensson, Kristine Rømer Thomsen, Lau M Andersen et al.
44 citations
Experiences that become meaningful to the self involve synchronous activity in a paralimbic network of self-awareness and dopaminergic activity, including medial prefrontal and medial parietal/posterior cingulate cortices. Oral administration of 100 mg dopamine improved noetic (conscious) metacognition in minimal self-awareness. In a separate experiment with extended self-awareness, dopamine improved retrieval accuracy of memories of self-judgment (autonoetic metacognition). Magnetoencephalography showed increased power of oscillations preferentially in the medial prefrontal cortex, explaining dopamine's specific effect on explicit self-awareness and autonoetic metacognition.
PNAS nexus
February 1, 2024
Benjy Barnett, Lau M Andersen, Stephen M Fleming et al.
7 citations
Perceptual vividness—the intensity of conscious experience—varies across different experiences, but how the brain registers this variation is unclear. In other psychological domains like number or reward, magnitude is represented independently of sensory features. Reanalyzing existing magnetoencephalography and functional MRI data from two studies that quantified vividness via subjective awareness and visibility ratings, evidence emerged for content-invariant neural signatures of vividness distributed across visual, parietal, and frontal cortices. These findings suggest that neural correlates of subjective vividness may share properties with magnitude codes in other cognitive domains.
The European journal of neuroscience
November 1, 2022
Lau M Andersen, Mikkel C Vinding, Kristian Sandberg et al.
The neural correlates of consciousness may not be fixed within a single brain region; instead, they can shift depending on the task a person performs. Using magnetoencephalography, researchers compared a perceptual task and a conceptual task that used identical visual stimuli. The perceptual task recruited more occipital brain activity than the conceptual task, while frontal activity varied between the two tasks in partly unexpected ways depending on the level of perceptual awareness. These results suggest that what a person is doing—the task at hand—influences which brain areas support conscious perception, challenging the idea that consciousness can be localized to a consistent set of regions.