Psychophysiology
May 22, 2008
Sahib S. Khalsa, David Rudrauf, Antonio Damasio et al.
276 citations
Meditation traditions claim that paying attention to internal body sensations increases awareness of them, but scientific evidence is lacking. Experienced meditators (Tibetan Buddhist and Kundalini) were compared to nonmeditators matched for age and body mass index on a heartbeat detection task, a standard measure of interoceptive awareness. Contrary to predictions, meditators showed no superior performance across several sessions and respiratory conditions. However, meditators consistently rated their interoceptive performance as better and the task as easier. These results suggest that practicing attention to internal body sensations, a core feature of meditation, does not enhance the ability to sense the heartbeat at rest.
Biological research
January 1, 2003
David Rudrauf, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli et al.
194 citations
Francisco Varela's work on subjectivity and consciousness is reviewed, presenting a view of subjectivity as deeply intertwined with biological and physical roots. His theory of concrete, embodied dynamics, grounded in autonomous systems, posits that biological autonomy defines life and identity as emergent, circular self-producing processes. Embodiment explains how a cognitive self arises from an organism's internal regulation and sensorimotor coupling, with global subjective properties emerging from component interactions and constraining local processes through recursive morphodynamics. Neurophenomenology uses first-person methods to examine experience, creating mutual constraints between biophysical data and subjective accounts, aiming to ground disciplined insight in biophysical emergence. Varela's contribution is framed as a "biophysics of being."
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
May 2, 2014
Carissa L. Philippi, Daniel Tranel, Melissa Duff et al.
152 citations
Damage to parts of the brain's default mode network (DMN) impairs autobiographical memory. In 92 patients with focal brain lesions, damage to the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, inferior parietal lobule, or medial temporal lobe led to memory deficits. Semantic and episodic autobiographical memories rely on largely distinct neural regions: semantic deficits followed left medial prefrontal and medial temporal damage, while episodic deficits followed right-sided damage, with overlap only in the right inferior parietal lobule. These results provide neuropsychological evidence that the DMN is necessary for autobiographical memory and clarify its role in self-referential processing.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2018
Kenneth Williford, Daniel Bennequin, Karl Friston et al.
85 citations
The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) combines a projective geometric model of the perspectival structure of conscious experience with a variational free-energy minimization model of active inference, explaining how consciousness serves a cybernetic function: modulating cognitive and affective dynamics to control embodied agents. Projective transformations link geometry and inference, integrating perception, emotion, memory, reasoning, and perspectival imagination to optimize behavior, resilience, and preference satisfaction. The PCM makes empirical predictions, fits a neurocomputational framework, and accounts for pre-reflective self-consciousness, the first-person perspective, the sense of ownership, and social self-consciousness. The authors argue it offers the most complete theory to date of phenomenal selfhood.
The MIT Press eBooks
December 16, 2025
David Rudrauf
The author recounts how Francisco Varela's mentorship shaped their views on consciousness, emphasizing the role of phenomenology in scientific theories of subjective experience. They describe years of introspective practice, including meditation and sustained isolation, which led to the intuition that consciousness has a three-dimensional projective structure. The author continues exploring the geometry of consciousness, particularly during the transition between wakefulness and sleep, and notes that altered states of awareness allowed them to follow conversations while appearing asleep.
Brain Sci
October 9, 2023
David Rudrauf, Grégoire Sergeant-Perthuis, Yvain Tisserand et al.
The Projective Consciousness Model proposes that projective geometry forms the core structure of conscious experience, integrating perception, imagination, motivation, emotion, social cognition, and action. The model argues that consciousness is not merely a byproduct of neural activity but is fundamentally organized by projective geometric principles, which allow the mind to construct a unified, egocentric spatial framework. This framework underpins how we perceive the world, imagine scenarios, feel emotions, and act. The theory suggests that these geometric structures enable the seamless integration of diverse mental functions, offering a unified account of consciousness that bridges phenomenology and neuroscience.
arXiv Preprint Archive
April 1, 2023
Grégoire Sergeant-Perthuis, Nils Ruet, David Rudrauf et al.
The geometry structuring an agent's internal world model shapes its spatial awareness and action planning. Using active inference, the authors show that a projective group structure transforms epistemic value nonlinearly, generating approach behaviors toward an object of interest, whereas the Euclidean group has no effect on epistemic value, leaving the agent idle. Formal simulations of a simple search task demonstrate these distinct behaviors. The projective group structure is linked to the Projective Consciousness Model, which is known to capture key features of consciousness. The work argues that geometry plays a key role in information integration and action planning by structuring a priori an agent's internal representation.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
March 23, 2022
Björn Merker, Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf
The authors respond to commentaries on their critique of integrated information theory (IIT). They first identify the main themes in the commentaries, then address two outlier views: that the problem of consciousness is solved or intractable. They discuss how non-IIT authors engage with the specifics of their critique, and finally respond to commentaries by IIT authors themselves.
The Behavioral and brain sciences
May 19, 2021
Björn Merker, Kenneth Williford, David Rudrauf
Integrated information theory (IIT) proposes that consciousness is identical to integrated information, measured by phi (Φ). Analysis of the formal properties of Φ shows it actually measures the causal efficacy of differentiated networks in accomplishing global information transfer, not consciousness itself. This misidentification leads IIT to attribute consciousness to systems such as electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, electronic circuit boards, and social networks—a consequence the theory embraces, moving toward panpsychism. The cortical combination of differentiation with integration that IIT equates with consciousness performs a different function in humans. Recognizing this functional misattribution avoids a departure from science and offers lessons for research on consciousness from formal and neural perspectives.
Journal of theoretical biology
September 7, 2017
David Rudrauf, Daniel Bennequin, Isabela Granic et al.
Consciousness is modeled as a spatial field structured by projective geometry and controlled by active inference. The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) combines sensory evidence with prior beliefs, selecting points of view and perspectives according to preferences. Violations of expectation are encoded as free energy, and minimizing free energy drives perspective taking, switching between perception, imagination, and action. Consciousness functions as an algorithm maximizing resilience by using projective perspective taking to escape local free energy minima. The model accounts for spatial phenomenology, distinctions between perception, imagination, and action, affective processes in intentionality, bistable figure dynamics, and body swap illusions. It relates phenomenology to function, suggesting computational advantages of consciousness and generating neurophenomenological hypotheses.