Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Daniel Polyakov, P A Robinson, Avigail Makbili et al.
Neural field theory (NFT) can model brain activity across different states of consciousness. By fitting a corticothalamic NFT model to EEG data from healthy individuals and patients with disorders of consciousness, researchers identified correlations between NFT parameters and features of both experimental and simulated EEG. These correlations distinguish healthy from impaired consciousness and point to potential physiological biomarkers. The findings clarify how consciousness levels are represented in the NFT framework and highlight its value for in-silico experimentation in consciousness research.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
James W Sanders, Raphaël Millière, Ema Demšar et al.
The psychedelic compound DMT induces highly immersive experiences that often include encounters with seemingly sentient presences. Using micro-phenomenology, immersion under DMT was characterized as a structured continuum from subtle to gross forms. Twenty-three participants received 20 mg intravenous DMT during fMRI-EEG, followed by detailed interviews. Analysis yielded 125 phenomenological categories describing structural dimensions like sensory faculties, spatial organization, and self-world configuration. Bodily effects typically preceded visual and auditory ones, and perceived presences emerged only after multisensory integration and 3D spatial characteristics had developed, illustrating a hierarchical relationship between subtle and gross immersion. Perceived presences varied widely in sensory modality, semantic complexity, and relational mode, showing immersion as a dynamic, constructive process.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Silvana Lozito, Stefano Lasaponara, Jianghao Liu et al.
Surface EEG recordings from 10 patients, previously studied with intracerebral electrodes, were analyzed to bridge the gap between depth and scalp measures of conscious report. Pooling trials across participants, event-related potentials showed a significant positive deflection for Seen compared to Unseen targets at frontal sites 350-500 milliseconds after the target, consistent with a P3b component. Time-frequency analysis revealed pretarget beta/gamma power modulations at frontal electrodes and post-target increased oscillatory activity at occipital sites. Clustering of intracerebral data identified two patterns: an early Visual cluster (120-340 ms) and a later Accumulation cluster (230-490 ms). Ridge regression showed the Accumulation cluster contributed more to predicting scalp ERPs, highlighting the greater role of late integrative mechanisms over early sensory processes in conscious experience.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Valerie Van Mulukom
Consciousness can be understood as a dynamic continuum between two self-states: a reflective, narrative mode supported by the default mode network, and an experiential, affective-salience mode anchored in the salience network (anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex). The experiential self-state integrates interoceptive and exteroceptive signals into a coherent, non-propositional sense of being-here-as-subject, with sustained non-reflective meta-awareness. Within predictive processing, this state involves reduced precision-weighting of high-level self-referential priors, governed by dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and serotonergic mechanisms. This framework accounts for individual differences in mindfulness and absorption, and for conditions with dysregulated salience processing. Self-transcendent experiences—absorption, meditation, awe, mystical or religious experiences—are expressions of the experiential self-state.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Zeynep Temel Başer, Gülsüm Uzer, Hansa Şentürk et al.
A new self-report questionnaire, the Consciousness States Comparison Scale: REM Version (CSCS-REM), was developed to measure how dream consciousness during REM sleep differs from waking consciousness. The final 35-item scale, derived from data from 432 participants, captures eight dimensions: Metacognitive Awareness, Cognitive Fluency, Memory, Temporal Awareness, Spatial Awareness, Emotional Awareness, Perceptual and Bodily Senses, and Interoceptive and Chemical Senses. The scale accounted for 56.04% of the variance, with reliability coefficients ranging from .639 to .915. Confirmatory factor analysis in a separate sample of 211 participants showed excellent model fit. The CSCS-REM enables systematic testing of continuity and discontinuity hypotheses in consciousness research.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Bianca Ventura, Andrea Buccellato, Saketh Malipeddi et al.
Vipassana and Shoonya meditation produce distinct alpha-band brain dynamics, with differences more apparent in temporal variability than in average activity. Vipassana, involving systematic body scanning, showed lower variability and more regular temporal patterns in both peak frequency and power of alpha oscillations. Shoonya, a non-directed attention practice, exhibited higher variability and irregularity in these measures. The findings suggest that dynamic features of brain activity, such as variability and temporal irregularity, may distinguish contemplative practices better than static averages, and could reflect a shared property of brain and experience.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Karen R Konkoly, Daniel J Morris, Kaitlyn Hurka et al.
REM-sleep dreaming can be experimentally guided toward specific unsolved problems and improve next-day creative problem-solving. Lucid dreamers who heard soundtracks of unsolved puzzles during REM sleep reported more dreams about those puzzles. In a post-hoc analysis, participants whose dreams were successfully biased by the sound cues solved more of the associated puzzles after waking. The study provides experimental evidence that REM dreams themselves, not just sleep-related memory reactivation, contribute to creative insight, addressing a long-standing gap in dream research that had relied on anecdotal or confounded evidence.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
María del Carmen Tejada, Antonia Zepeda, Alejandro Troncoso et al.
Empathy relies on bodily processes, but how Parkinson's disease (PD) disrupts this is unclear. Using a neurophenomenological approach, 42 people with PD watched pain-related videos while their self-reports, postural movement, heart rate, and electrodermal activity were recorded. Phenomenological interviews after exposure revealed two distinct empathic modes: Resonance Bodyssence, where emotions tightly couple with bodily sensations and movement, and Marginal Resonance Bodyssence, a more observational, cognitively mediated response with reduced bodily resonance. Integrating first-person data with quantitative measures shows that interindividual variability in motor and physiological responses in PD reflects distinct embodied empathic engagements, advancing an embodied account of empathy as a heterogeneous, dynamically enacted phenomenon.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Ralph Andrews, Paul M Dockree
A new framework called Rhythmic Embodied Perception (REP) proposes that breathing rhythms shape conscious experience by modulating brain activity. Slow respiratory cycles influence cortical oscillations, creating brief periods of low excitability during which sensory information is most likely to reach awareness. Volitional breath control can stabilize these dynamics by engaging neuromodulatory systems, extending these perceptual windows and enhancing attentional stability. The framework generates testable predictions, such as that respiratory phase should affect sensory detection and that slow-paced breathing should strengthen respiration-cortex coupling. It integrates neuroscience, theories of discrete perception, and yogic concepts of prana, positioning respiration as a trainable tool for shaping perception and attention.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Vikas N O'Reilly-Shah, Alessandro Maria Selvitella, Aaron Schurger
The unfolding argument claims that causal structure cannot matter for consciousness because any recurrent neural network can be replaced by a feedforward network with the same input-output behavior. This paper shows a boundary condition: when a network has rapid plasticity—weights that change quickly based on history—the equivalence fails. Mathematical proofs demonstrate that such systems encode information in ways a static feedforward network cannot capture, including history-dependent dynamics, complex temporal encoding, and perturbational instability. The results do not prove that recurrence or plasticity is necessary for consciousness, but they show that the unfolding argument does not block empirical tests of whether these properties matter.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Jonathan Lomax Boyd, Eric Allen Jensen, Aaron Michael Jensen et al.
Public views on biocomputers—biological computers built with brain organoids—were explored in an online survey. Most respondents supported research on and creation of biocomputers, and for some, support increased as the devices were perceived to be more conscious, a pattern that conflicts with standard moral philosophy. Three distinct clusters of opinion emerged regarding the scope of consciousness in human and non-human entities, and these clusters strongly predicted views on the cognitive capacities and moral status of biocomputers. The findings suggest that public ethical reasoning about engineered neural systems may not follow conventional philosophical frameworks, highlighting the need for broader stakeholder engagement to inform governance.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2026
Annie G Bryant, Christopher J Whyte
A family of functional connectivity measures based on tracking the 'center of mass' between two brain signals outperforms other measures at decoding conscious visual perception from magnetoencephalography data. These measures generalize across brain regions central to both Integrated Information Theory and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory. Neural mass models simulating each theory's hypothesized dynamics showed that both the GNWT-based model (featuring delayed ignition dynamics) and the IIT-based model (relying on synchronous sensory dynamics) captured the observed connectivity patterns. However, the presence of ignition dynamics independent of task-demand conditions contradicts IIT predictions, lending tentative support to GNWT. The work introduces a framework for systematically identifying and testing neural correlates of conscious vision.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Elise G Rowe, Ken Takeda, Masafumi Oizumi et al.
Top-down attention affects not just whether we see something, but how we see it—the quality of conscious experience, or qualia. Using a dual-task paradigm, participants rated similarity of stimulus pairs in the periphery for rotated letters, bisected disks, and greyscale faces. Similarity ratings served as a proxy for qualia structures, analyzed with dimension reduction and optimal transport alignment. Attention withdrawal collapsed qualia structures for letters and disks, but alignment accuracy remained high for face qualia structures under both full and poor attention. This relational judgment approach extends previous binary categorization methods and offers a novel way to study qualia structures.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Vince Polito, Stephanie Howarth, Andrew Roberts et al.
Anomalous experiences like hallucinations and mystical experiences are linked to delusional ideation, religiosity, and paranormal beliefs, which some researchers attribute to 'transliminality'—a sensitivity to stimuli entering consciousness. The strongest prior evidence came from a 2002 study finding transliminality predicted responses to subperceptual primes. This high-powered replication attempted to confirm that transliminality predicts identification of such primes and that this is due to stimulus sensitivity, not response bias. Participants completed a transliminality measure and an online card-guessing task with subperceptual primes. Results showed strong evidence against any association between transliminality and prime perception in both tasks, failing to support transliminality as a measure of subperceptual processing.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Anikó Kusztor, Nirmitee Mulay, Makiko Yamada et al.
People experiencing depersonalization or derealization often report that the world looks faded, foggy, or dream-like. Two online experiments tested whether these subjective reports reflect genuine changes in visual perception. Participants with varying levels of depersonalization/derealization symptoms rated how real naturalistic images looked (Experiment 1, 200 participants) or adjusted the contrast and saturation of images to match their everyday visual experience (Experiment 2, 125 participants). In both experiments, strong Bayesian evidence supported the null models: symptom severity did not affect realness ratings or vividness adjustments. The results suggest that the altered vividness experience in derealization does not stem from genuine perceptual changes but rather from metacognitive interpretation of those experiences.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Trevor Hewitt, Ioanna Amaya, Romy Beauté et al.
Exposure to rapid, bright stroboscopic light has been known for over 200 years to induce vivid visual hallucinations of color and geometric shapes. This narrative review summarizes the history of research on stroboscopic light stimulation (SLS), its recreational and lay-therapeutic uses, the phenomenology of the experiences it produces, and current understanding of potential neural mechanisms. Despite progress, fundamental questions remain about the full characterization of its phenomenology, its precise physiological origins, the conditions under which it leads to altered states of consciousness, and possible clinical applications.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Eleftheria Pistolas, Johan Wagemans
A Ganzfeld—a homogeneous, unstructured visual field—induces visual hallucinations and characteristic decays of color and brightness. This paper synthesizes literature from the 1930s onward to clarify terminology for these decaying experiences. Using a custom-built Ganzfeld space to avoid the confinement of translucent goggles, the authors employed a multi-method approach combining quantitative and qualitative measures. They identified three distinct types of decays: 'fade-out', 'black-out', and 'blank-out', reporting their prevalence and qualitative features. The work also examines the role of eye movements and blinks on experienced phenomena, providing groundwork for studying Ganzfeld experiences in relation to consciousness and neural correlates.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Joaquim Streicher, Sascha Meyen, Volker H Franz et al.
A common method for studying unconscious processing compares participants' ability to consciously detect a stimulus with an indirect measure of processing, such as reaction time or brain activity. If the direct measure shows no awareness but the indirect measure shows a significant effect, researchers conclude the stimulus was processed unconsciously. However, this reasoning rests on a statistical fallacy: the sensitivities of the two measures are never directly compared. Reanalyzing 80 experimental conditions from 16 fMRI studies, only eight provided evidence for unconscious processing when sensitivities were properly compared. This suggests that the scope of unconscious processing—both its capacity and the brain areas involved—has been overestimated.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2024
Dmitri Filimonov, Andreas Krabbe, Antti Revonsuo et al.
Aware auditory experiences are linked to a specific brain signal, the auditory awareness negativity (AAN), which remains unchanged whether listeners pay attention to sounds or must respond to them. In contrast, a later brain signal, the late positivity (LP), is influenced by both attention and the requirement to respond. These findings suggest that AAN is a genuine neural correlate of auditory consciousness, while LP reflects higher-level processing that may depend on a global workspace.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2024
Veith Weilnhammer
New evidence shows that applying transcranial magnetic stimulation to the parietal cortex does not alter bistable perception, challenging some theories about the neural correlates of consciousness. This finding suggests that the parietal cortex may not be directly involved in generating conscious perceptual switches, prompting a reconsideration of where and how to search for the brain mechanisms underlying conscious experience.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2024
Ruben E Laukkonen, Evan Lewis-Healey, Luca Ghigliotti et al.
A novel multivariate spatial filter called Rhythmic Entrainment Source Separation can extract steady-state visual evoked potentials from EEG data to quantify perceptual switch rates during binocular rivalry without requiring self-reports. This method may be valuable for studying consciousness in contexts where self-reports are problematic or impossible. The analyses also indicate that no-report conditions may affect attention deployment and thereby neural correlates, an important consideration for consciousness research.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2023
Jan Erik Bellingrath
Subjective experience always unfolds in time, but it also includes a sense of the immediate past and future, forming what William James called the 'specious present.' This paper proposes a new theory—the Self-Simulational Theory of temporal extension—which explains how the subjective experience of a temporal 'now' arises from a difference between actual and counterfactual self-representations. The theory is presented conceptually and formalized using information theory in a neuronally realistic framework. Convergent evidence from studies of temporal experience, altered states of consciousness, and mental illness supports the theory, which can account for systematic variations in how long the present moment feels across different conditions. The work has implications for the neuroscience of consciousness and understanding mental illness.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2021
Mirko Lehmann, Claudia Neumann, Sven Wasserthal et al.
A single intravenous dose of ketamine (100 ng/ml) impairs metacognitive sensitivity and increases metacognitive bias in healthy young adults during an episodic memory task, without affecting memory performance or reaction times. The drug also increases brain activation in posterior cortical areas associated with consciousness, though this activation is not specific to confidence judgments. Ketamine administered during encoding does not significantly affect performance or brain activation. These findings indicate that ketamine disrupts the ability to accurately monitor one's own memory performance.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2020
Matthew J Davidson, Irene L Graafsma, Naotsugu Tsuchiya et al.
Perceptual filling-in (PFI) happens when a visible target disappears from conscious awareness and its location is filled in by the surrounding background. This study tracked brain activity using steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEPs) while participants reported when four peripheral targets disappeared or reappeared against a dynamically updating background. Background SSVEPs closely matched subjective reports and increased with more filled-in targets. Unexpectedly, as more targets filled in, the duration of disappearances grew, suggesting facilitatory interactions across visual quadrants. Distinct spatiotemporal correlates appeared: before genuine PFI, the second harmonic (40 Hz) increased before the first (20 Hz), possibly linked to attention, a pattern absent for physically removed stimuli. These findings show PFI can study multi-object perceptual suppression and reveal distinct neural correlates for endogenous versus exogenous changes in consciousness.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2020
Colin Klein, Andrew B Barron
For materialists, the hard problem of consciousness is an explanatory gap: why does brain activity produce experience rather than nothing at all? This paper argues that the interventionist theory of explanation, which relies on systematic experimental interventions and invariant generalizations, can help move beyond that gap. The authors propose that second-order interventions—interventions that alter the relationship between first-order interventions and conscious experience—are key, just as they were for other scientific mysteries. They also suggest that safe, reliable self-intervention can address both the hard problem and the meta-problem (why the hard problem feels so intractable). Current intervention strategies are evaluated for improvement.