The brain displays intrinsic durations in its own spontaneous activity - Intrinsic Neural Timescales (INTs). INTs are hierarchically organized, with shorter durations within unimodal regions and longer intervals in multimodal domains. Despite significant progress, it's currently not known whether the unimodal-multimodal hierarchical organization undergoes recurrent changes itself - consistent...
Time delays are a signature of many physical systems, including the brain, and considerably shape their dynamics; moreover, they play a key role in consciousness, as postulated by the temporo-spatial theory of consciousness (TTC). However, they are often not known a priori and need to be estimated from time series. In this study, we propose the use of permutation entropy (PE) to estimate time...
Consciousness is a mental characteristic of the human mind, whose exact neural features remain unclear. We aimed to identify the critical nodes within the brain's global functional network that support consciousness. To that end, we collected a large fMRI resting state dataset with subjects in at least one of the following three consciousness states: preserved (including the healthy awake...
Previous studies have demonstrated that altered states of consciousness are related to changes in resting state activity in the default-mode network (DMN). Anatomically, the DMN can be divided into anterior and posterior regions. The anterior DMN includes the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex and other medial prefrontal cortical regions, whereas the posterior DMN includes regions such as the...
OBJECTIVE: We aimed to investigate the roles of different resting-state networks in predicting both the actual level of consciousness and its recovery in brain injury patients. METHODS: We investigated resting-state functional connectivity within different networks in patients with varying levels of consciousness: unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS; n = 56), minimally conscious state (MCS;...
Recent studies have demonstrated resting-state abnormalities in midline regions in vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome and minimally conscious state patients. However, the functional implications of these resting-state abnormalities remain unclear. Recent findings in healthy subjects have revealed a close overlap between the neural substrate of self-referential processing and the...