New trends in the empirical study of consciousness: Measures and mechanisms.
Eur J Neurosci November 18, 2024 Athina Tzovara, Thomas Andrillon, Katrin H. Preller et al.
Consciousness research has two main approaches: studying the global state of being conscious (e.g., during sleep, anesthesia, or brain injury) and studying the specific contents of consciousness (e.g., perceiving a particular stimulus). This special issue collects 12 articles that investigate mechanisms and measures of consciousness. Key findings include that during sevoflurane anesthesia in mice, neural complexity in the somatosensory cortex diminishes while firing rates and long-range connections decrease in deep cortical layers. Other work shows that during anesthesia, word judgments can be preserved while working memory is impaired. Auditory EEG responses during sleep have complexity and spectral slope modulated by sleep stages.