In bipolar disorder, the sense of time's speed is distorted: manic patients experience inner time as too fast and outer time as too slow, while depressed patients experience inner time as too slow and outer time as too fast. This desynchronization between self-time and world-time arises from opposite changes in neuronal variability—specifically, the standard deviation ratio between somatomotor and sensory brain networks. The authors' empirical data show abnormal SD balance in both manic and depressed bipolar patients, as well as in major depressive disorder. These findings suggest that individualized stimulation techniques like TMS or tDCS might normalize the neuronal variability patterns in these networks, potentially correcting the distorted time perception.
During nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, consciousness fades as the brain's dynamic functional connectivity changes. Using simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings in 12 healthy men, the study examined two aspects of dynamic connectivity: mean (dFCmean), reflecting stable network integrity, and variance (dFCvar), indicating instability of information transfer. As sleep deepened, dFCmean decreased progressively across waking and NREM stages (N0~N1 > N2 > N3), while dFCvar peaked during N2 stage (N0~N1 < N3 < N2), suggesting unstable whole-brain synchronizations. In N3 stage, overall network integration was disrupted, with lowest dFCmean and elevated dFCvar. The findings suggest that consciousness dissipates when network specificity breaks down alongside increasing variability of information exchange.
The higher-order-thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, as developed by Rosenthal, can be interpreted in two ways: a one-component view and a two-component view. The two-component view aligns better with Rosenthal's aim of making HOT an explanatory theory applicable to empirical science, but it fails to account for cases of radical confabulation. The authors argue that neither interpretation adequately handles these counterexamples, and adopting a disjunctive strategy that includes both versions offers no empirical or explanatory benefit.