Brain : a journal of neurology
August 7, 2026
Dorottya Szocs, Andrea I Luppi, Peter Coppola et al.
The precise neuromodulatory mechanisms underlying consciousness and its disorders, despite growing evidence in both animals and humans, remain poorly understood at the subcortical level. The basal ganglia, a key component of the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop, are known to play a crucial role in mediating consciousness and behavioural responsiveness to the environment. Here, we...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
June 7, 2026
Andrea I. Luppi, Dragana Manasova, Justine Y. Hansen et al.
preprint
Consciousness and cognition arise from the ongoing interactions between brain regions. Synchronous fluctuations of fMRI signals may indicate that two brain regions perform similar cognitive functions, but neural interactions are also constrained by anatomical connectivity and regions’ molecular, cytoarchitectonic, and metabolic profiles. Here we disentangle the respective contributions of...
Brain Communications
2026
Dorottya Szocs, Dian Lyu, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
Currently, there is substantial ongoing discussion around the functional role of the thalamus in consciousness. What is missing in the literature, however, is a systematic investigation of the relevance of specific thalamic nuclei in pharmacologically and pathologically altered states of consciousness in humans. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging in both healthy...
Elife
July 18, 2024
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
49 citations
How is the information-processing architecture of the human brain organised, and how does its organisation support consciousness? Here, we combine network science and a rigorous information-theoretic notion of synergy to delineate a 'synergistic global workspace', comprising gateway regions that gather synergistic information from specialised modules across the human brain. This information is...
Neuroimage
February 11, 2023
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
High-level brain functions are widely believed to emerge from the orchestrated activity of multiple neural systems. However, lacking a formal definition and practical quantification of emergence for experimental data, neuroscientists have been unable to empirically test this long-standing conjecture. Here we investigate this fundamental question by leveraging a recently proposed framework known...
Communications Biology
January 28, 2023
Andrea I. Luppi, Jakub Vohryzek, Morten L. Kringelbach et al.
98 citations
A central question in neuroscience is how consciousness arises from the dynamic interplay of brain structure and function. Here we decompose functional MRI signals from pathological and pharmacologically-induced perturbations of consciousness into distributed patterns of structure-function dependence across scales: the harmonic modes of the human structural connectome. We show that...
Communications Biology
November 3, 2022
Peter Coppola, Judith Allanson, Lorina Naci et al.
Typical consciousness can be defined as an individual-specific stream of experiences. Modern consciousness research on dynamic functional connectivity uses clustering techniques to create common bases on which to compare different individuals. We propose an alternative approach by combining modern theories of consciousness and insights arising from phenomenology and dynamical systems theory....
Communications Biology
April 20, 2022
Andrea I. Luppi, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
The human brain entertains rich spatiotemporal dynamics, which are drastically reconfigured when consciousness is lost due to anaesthesia or disorders of consciousness (DOC). Here, we sought to identify the neurobiological mechanisms that explain how transient pharmacological intervention and chronic neuroanatomical injury can lead to common reconfigurations of neural activity. We developed and...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
July 23, 2021
Lennart R.b. Spindler, Andrea I. Luppi, Ram Adapa et al.
Significance Understanding the neural bases of consciousness is of basic scientific and clinical importance. Human neuroimaging has established that a network of interconnected brain regions known as the default mode network disintegrates in anesthesia and after brain damage that causes disorders of consciousness. However, the neurochemical underpinnings of this network change remain largely...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 12, 2021
Peter Coppola, Lennart R.b. Spindler, Andrea I. Luppi et al.
preprint
Small world topologies are thought to provide a valuable insight into human brain organisation and consciousness. However, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in consciousness have not yielded consistent results. Given the importance of dynamics for both consciousness and cognition, here we investigate how the diversity of brain dynamics pertaining to small world topology (quantified...
PLoS One
February 13, 2020
Thomas F. Varley, Michael M. Craig, Ram Adapa et al.
Recent evidence suggests that the quantity and quality of conscious experience may be a function of the complexity of activity in the brain and that consciousness emerges in a critical zone between low and high-entropy states. We propose fractal shapes as a measure of proximity to this critical point, as fractal dimension encodes information about complexity beyond simple entropy or randomness,...
Nature Communications
October 10, 2019
Andrea I. Luppi, Michael M. Craig, Ioannis Pappas et al.
Prominent theories of consciousness emphasise different aspects of neurobiology, such as the integration and diversity of information processing within the brain. Here, we combine graph theory and dynamic functional connectivity to compare resting-state functional MRI data from awake volunteers, propofol-anaesthetised volunteers, and patients with disorders of consciousness, in order to...
PLoS Computational Biology
October 16, 2014
Srivas Chennu, Paola Finoia, Evelyn Kamau et al.
249 citations
Theoretical advances in the science of consciousness have proposed that it is concomitant with balanced cortical integration and differentiation, enabled by efficient networks of information transfer across multiple scales. Here, we apply graph theory to compare key signatures of such networks in high-density electroencephalographic data from 32 patients with chronic disorders of consciousness,...